Persephone
by FearandLoathingXIX
Summary: Be careful what you wish for, was what absolutely no one said to Charlotte La Bouff beforehand. She couldn't have known. Lottie/Facilier.
1. I

I can never go too long without some Disney writing. This one accidentally swallowed up my entire soul so _oh well_.

For fun facts this was inspired by a gifset of Dr. Facilier and the Hades and Persephone myth.

IF YOU CAME FROM TUMBLR, A, you're the best, and B, start from the line break in the middle.

* * *

_Part 1 - _Persephone

Chapter 1

* * *

Lottie's Happily Ever After sure was taking its sweet Louisiana time.

She understood patience and keep-it-together girl and hold onto your biscuits because prince charming's on his way, but he was _late_ and her breasts weren't going to be so perky forever. At first it was perfect and simple to grow up slow and marry a little prince and she she and Tia would be real sisters and no one could say squat to her about 'that coloured girl' because they would be family. Until someone mentioned that by the time little Ralphie was going to be eighteen she'd be nearly thirty and there were age gaps and there were age _canyons._

So while that ship hadn't quite sailed, she sure would love to be swept her off her feet and solve all these little issues. Except she just wasn't goodat sitting on her pretty butt and waiting, because she was gotta-have-it-now and she wanted what she wanted.

Of course, everyone said that wishing on stars past the age of twelve was silly, and Lottie knew chances were her prince would come into town on a train and not a white horse, when she sawthat Evening Star twinkling in the sky, right next to its lover like destiny and true love and all those things were real, those wishes slipped out of her like hiccups. _Please make me a princess please make me a princess oh __**please**__ make me a princess!_ But you know that stubborn star wouldn't even give her a beignet and she was running outta patience.

That was why she went to the fortune teller, in as many words. Her shop in a sleepy backalley with a newly-painted sign and deadeyed masks that stared out of their hollow black sockets. Everyone had said, Tia most of all, not to mess with shadow magic, not even once. Except Tiana _had _her happily ever after; she had her prince and one heck of a prince he was. Lottie figured that there just hadto be enough magic in the world for her too.

"I want you to read my fortune," she told the witch, who sat across the table like a puppet on strings with her headdress and all of four teeth and wicked twinkles in her eyes. "But make sure it's the right one."

"Fate's not your pet," the crone squawked. "The crystal sees only what is there." To Lottie it looked exactly like a big glass ball and not like any kind of magic that was going to solve her problems for her, but she paid anyway.

"All I want is my future," she stated, full of big intentions. "One with romance an' true love and me being a princess as long as I live, okay?" The woman looked like she was swilling her teeth around in her mouth, then parted her lips in a gummy smile.

"Very well," she crowed, pulling up her sleeves. When she sat sat her wrinkled hands on the ball it let out a noise like cats going down a blackboard and Lottie screamed. The old woman shook like a bolting pony, which wasn't a good sign, much less the eerie light that was filling the globe from within, as if it was going to burst like a balloon and all the magic would drown them both. Then with a soft pop it was gone and the room was still again.

"Is that it?" she piped.

"Do you truly want what you ask?" the old woman rasped.

"I do, I really do," she blurted. Wishing on magic was the only thing she had, when she had it all already and it still wasn't enough. A deep laugh echoed up from under her feet, as if it were eavesdropping down there inside her purse.

"Go!" the woman snapped with sudden fear, as if recognition had struck her. "Powerful forces would grant your wishes."

"Isn't that a good thing?" she retorted, noticing how the shadows were getting deeper, like a leak was letting them in.

"Leave!" the woman bellowed, her braids flying back with the force of her terror. "Do not return!" Lottie hopped up like a bunch of bees got up her skirt and ran outta there as fast as her high heels would take her.

The street should have seemed bright after being inside such a dark little shop, but instead it was all sepia. Had the world always been this colourless, she wondered. Maybe she'd been blinded by the colours within. Still, she ran home and got under her covers and tried very hard not to think about it all. It was just a silly parlour trick, she told herself. The fortune teller only wanted to scare her.

In a night she'd forgotten about it, and laughed with her friends and went out for coffee and cakes and it was all just a strange thing that had happened but not really happened. It became a story to tell for laughs, until the moment Tia grew ten years into her mother and outright scolded her.

Lottie found herself pleading, as Tia wanted to up and take her straight down to Mama Odie all the way out in the Bayou just in case. It seemed too serious and intimidating to act like it'd been real. It was nothing, _nothing_ she said so many times her mouth was tired of it, until the words meant nothing. Tia was finally convinced, and when the next rush of customers came through she was off again with springs in her shoes, just Lottie and Naveen catching her dust.

"Don't frown," he cooed in his melted-chocolate voice that still stoked Lottie's fire even though he was her best friend's husband and that was okay but it didn't mean he was any less of what he was. "She's only worried for you."

"I know," she sighed. She had done enough worrying for herself already. "Say, you didn't remember any middle brothers, did you?" she asked cheerfully, changing that subject before it could gather dust. He chuckled and smiled and promised her she'd get the first one he found, but it was only promises and she knew that. Lottie had a sweet tooth all over, and she just wanted something a little bit more than what she had.

Soon enough, like all her troubles, it was put away and paid no more dues. Lottie's life was back to the puff-pastry chocolate-sunday it'd always been, and probably always would be.

Until the first night without a moon. It'd been a calm day, followed by any other New Orleans eve, until something woke her in dark so thick she couldn't see the end of her own nose.

_'Princess_,' it whispered on the wind, tickling her hair around her ears. _'Princessssss'_ hissing like a snake or steam or geese.

"Hello?" she mumbled in a confused croak. "Who's there?" Again it whispered, like the rustling of leaves, but the sounds were so distinct. _Princess_, it beckoned_. _"Are you... talking to me?" she dared to ask.

_'Come'_ the voice with a texture of black coffee answered, and she was up out of her bed like it was nails. Before she was scared, she was something else entirely, and when a light appeared at one end of her room like a will-o-wisp, it took hold of her. She walked to the tear of fire, but before she could reach it the little thing vanished, only to be replaced by another further away.

She grabbed a dressing gown and shuffled on her slippers and followed the lights out of her house, off the estate, and further into town. The streets were black and quiet, but there should have been more people. _Any _people. The whole city was a ghost town – or was she the ghost?

She turned down an alleyway and into a square, and only when the last light vanished did Lottie recognise where she was. Back outside the voodoo shop, which was lit although there were no lamps, no fire. It was as if the very stones were shining.

She'd been told never to come back here, had promised the same, but here she was. Except she couldn't remember much of anything, like why she'd sworn against it or why she was here at all. It was like she'd been sleeping beauty, out on a dreamland stroll.

_'Do you really want to be a princess?' _the voice crept up out of the cobblestones. It was scary and strange; she was in her nightclothes half-way across the city talking to magical glowing light, but darnit to all she _did _still want it.

"... Yes," she breathed, and no sooner was the noise on her mouth than something jumped up her legs, wrapping around her ankles. She gasped and then there was another, a thick black tendril that looped over her head. She looked down to see a black puddle beneath her feet, lit with electric purples like cracks of lightning, and her feet had sunk into the pavement.

Screaming and screaming and screaming until her throat was sore, she fell down into the stone like it was a bog or quicksand, thrashing arms which only became more tangled in the smothering dark. Her voice silenced when the shadows swirled up her neck and crawled down her throat, drowning her out as her eyes slipped under.

She woke on hard ground.

It was hot, the kind of heat that pushed at the back of your mouth and made you feel dizzy. All she could see was strange shadows, like the inside of a cave lit from a long way away.

"Mademoiselle," a crawling molasses voice reached out of the blurr, and she strained her eyes into focus. When she saw him she could've screamed, were her sounds not already scratched raw and stolen.

He was tall, taller than any man ought to be, and straight as a skeleton. Elongated hands rested on a cane so narrow it was almost unseeable, a heavy orb between them. Jacket so dark it had no texture, with sharp square shoulders and long tails. Eyes wide and black looked out from a face that appeared half a skull, obscured under the brim of a tall hat.

"S-Sh-Sh." She jittered like she'd got a bunch of rabbits inside her. "Shadow man." She knew who he was.

"If you like," he answered velvetly. About that point questions started running down her tongue and hopping off her mouth like stampeding cattle.

"Where am I?" she piped. "What happened? How did I- I didn't make no deals with-"

"This is no deal, madamoiselle," he purred, and for the first time moved. He didn't walk like a man any more, more like ink pouring around the outline of a man. His steps were strokes of a calligraphy brush. "You are my honoured guest."

* * *

Charlotte La Bouff woke up in her own room, sitting bolt upright and feeling tears coarse down her cheeks.

"It was a dream," she gasped, looking around her room, exactly as it should be. "It was a _dream_. Oh thank lord it was a dream!" She was about to hop out of bed and chase down her dog, or Big Daddy, or _anyone_; bust them out of bed just to have something warm and alive to touch. However, Stella's basket was empty in her room. She looked to her window and saw nothing outside. Not even the lights of the street, or the city just beyond her walls as it ought be.

"Then keep on, dreamer," his voice had a buzz like hornets, full of venom and fear. "You're not awake yet." He was at the far end of her room, like someone had tipped black paint down the wall and it was him in the streaks and slicks of oil.

"No," she protested. "_No_." She pinched her arm, then pinched it again. She realised she was still in her dressing gown, and in her bed were the slippers that she'd walked half-way across the city chasing magical lights that led her into his jaws.

"Welcome," he drawled, ridden with sarcasm. "I don't believe we've been formally introduced."

"I know who you are," she stated, and didn't doubt that the reverse was true. "Where am I?" Looking to her bedroom door, she wondered what was really behind the exit he so carefully blocked.

"You're in my world now," he rolled on with the rhythm and blues in his voice.

"How?" she shot. "Why! You put me _back_, Shadow Man." He laughed to the tune of black pepper and chillies.

"No can do," he denied, and she didn't believe a word of it. "This is what you wanted."

"How dare you say that!" she retorted. "I _never _did ask for this."

"But you did," he countered musically, picking himself up off the wall and shaking out like a rug that needed dusting.

"Don't you try any of your little parlour tricks on me," she declared, kicking off her fake-covers from her fake-bed and rummaging under the covers for her lost slipper. "I want to go home right this _instant_."

"You wantedto be a princess," he reminded her. That was true, but she didn't see how it had much to do with anything.

"So?" She dropped her slipper down and stuffed a foot into it, stepped up on her bedroom heels and feeling bigger and bolder.

"So – this is your kingdom," he pronounced. The shock was like water so hot or cold you couldn't tell which was which.

"What?" she gasped, looking up at her ceiling like there might be a rope ladder and a hole she could climb back out of. "This... this isn't anywhere." Just a fake-bedroom with a voodoo man who ought to have been dragged off into hell after what he did.

"You're on the other side," he soothed without any real empathy in his voice. "It might take some getting used to."

"Like heck it will!" she shrieked. She was confused and scared and had had just about enough of all this. "Now you listen to me – I didn't make a deal with you, and I'm not gonna be any _princess _of whatever it is you think you're runnin', and I bet the Almighty's gonna have a fierce word or two with _you _when he finds out what you've been doing dragging poor innocent girls into some kinda hell-hole in the backstreets of New Orleans!" His laugh was a rock skimming on the Mississippi, each skip a little further than the last, hopping all the way out before disappearing under the surface.

"_I'm_ the Almighty down here," he jeered. "Big Daddy ain't around no more to look after you, little Lottie."

"Oh I swear if you don't take me back I'm gonna start _screaming!_" She had her hands balled into fists, like it'd fix anything.

"Would you like to start?" he taunted, and in a step that seemed to pass across a magnifying lens, he was right in front of her, one hand outstretched. He twisted it and there sat a glass full of cold, still water. A mockery of everything.

Lottie knocked that glass out of his hand so hard it flew into the wall and smashed, though no glass or water fell out, and she opened her mouth and let out the kind of scream that usually had every person and dog in a hundred-yard radius ducking for the hills. She screamed so hard her throat opened up and every bit of fear and confusion and anger turned into one solid channel of sound that ripped out of her like tobacco spit and she did _not stop _until she was getting dizzy.

Except the Shadow Man was still right there, still in front of her with a twisted expression of amusement and pity.

"Did that help?" he queried. She was about ready to bust she was so mad. Nothing made a difference.

"I'm not scared of you!" she shrieked, pitching climbing up the walls like a cat on curtains. "You're just... just a two-cent _witch doctor_ who couldn't keep a bargain and the spirits dragged you off!" She'd been told by Tiana how he left this world, had even been so brave and foolish as to go to the grave and see what was left behind. "I'm _not _afraid of you and you are going to take me back home RIGHT THIS INSTANT or so help me I'm going to-"

"Justa witch doctor?!" he retaliated, cutting down on her like a buzz saw. "You think they dragged me here because I was worth nothin? You're in _my _world now," he snarled, "and you'd do to use some respect in it"" Something had been changing in the room. The walls were darkening, radiating a vicious energy, creeping closer to her like they were going to fall in and crush her.

"You take me home!" she screamed. It was the only thing she could do.

"SILENCE!" His voice was hellfire and terror and the war-cry of every man and animal in the world going to battle and dying at the same time. The room was hot, getting hotter every second, and pitch-black shadows were sinking through the floor and the ceiling and creeping at her.

"Seems tou're as stupid as you are loud," he said with a low, glaring attitude, and Lottie was skipping back over shadows to the steps of a dance she didn't know. Maybe, just maybe screeching at him like a parrot wasn't the smartest thing to have done. As she backed against the wall, it occurred to her that it might be the lastthing she'd ever do.

All at once a shadow spread out from under his feet that was ten times his size, and black as anything had ever been. It spread wings across her walls and reached claws along the floor and went for Lottie like it was going to rip her up and swallow her. The Shadow Man stood there motionless, a statue with a sour expression as his creature lunged for her. Lottie topped every shriek she'd made so far, and passed out.


	2. II

II

* * *

The second time Charlotte woke in her own bed, she wasn't half as sure it had all just been a dream-nightmare-worst-night-of-her-life. In fact she wasn't sure at _all._ The only thing in common with the first time was that she was still crying. She was lucky she had no makeup on or she'd be looking about as scary as the Shadow Man by now. She gave a gulp and then a sob, fat tears rolling down her cheeks as she curled up over her knees and wished and wished, but there were no stars in here.

"There, there." He was in front of her in the time it took to blink an eye. "Feeling better?" He reached out a hand, this time holding a chalice of dark red juice. Lottie only stared at it and kept her hands wrapped tightly around her knees.

"I want to go home," she said brokenly, pride and strength in tatters stuffing her pillows.

"You wanted to be a princess," he reminded her. A snap of his fingers and the glass was gone. "Which is it you really want?"

"This isn't fair," she replied, tears still gushing down her face like she was trying to be a waterfall. "I didn't ask for this."

"You wanted what you wanted, regardless of consequence," he foretold. He was too big and somehow still too close. A head seven feet up could feel like it whispered in her ear. The words curled around her neck like a stole she couldn't shake off.

"I never made a deal with you," she said weakly. "You can't keep me here."

"Can't I?" he challenged, and he was too big and dark and scary to argue with. He could and probably would. "Come with me, mademoiselle," he coaxed, voice a soft roar.

"I don't want to," she protested, and his fingers fluttered like they were made of moths.

"_Come_," he said more forcefully.

"No," she huffed. He could keep her here, she told herself, but he couldn't make her do anything.

"I won't ask again-" he started like a threat and an insult rolled up in the same cigarette paper.

"Then don't!" she spat. "If I'm a princess then I can stay in bed as long as I want!" She threw herself back and pulled a pillow over her head. Obviously she _wasn't _a princess and he was mocking her and she was stupid and childish to have ever thought it might be real, but now she'd got what she had and didn't know how to get rid of it.

"I SAID-" he snarled, and for an instant the pillows were hot like they might burst into flames. Even the walls were angry, and she was just a mouse that a snake was right about to gobble up. Then in an instant it dissipated and he was still again. "I asked you to come with me." She pulled her head out of the pillows and peeked at him.

"Why should I?" she asked miserably.

"Because I don't _have_ to ask your permission," he growled, and he clenched his fingers and her hand was suddenly in them. She didn't remember moving, but there it was, skin fizzing against his like she'd stuck her hand in soda water.

He released her a second later and she was on her feet, like a puppeteer had picked her up by the strings. He tucked hands behind his back and walked to her bedroom door; she followed not because she wanted to but because she didn't know what else to do. Without touching the door flew open and they passed out into some kind of hallway, endless in each direction.

He walked, and like a wooden toy on a string she followed. Scattered along each wall were doors carved several inches thick with ornaments and decoration, all-seeing eyes staring out from each one. Lottie hurried past, feeling watched.

"Don't worry," the Shadow Man said like her mind was printed out on her forehead for him to read. "You are safe with me." She didn't know what to say to that. She could've asked if she was safe with him when he was threatening to rip her apart with his shadow, or when he dragged her screaming and terrified from her own world into this one, but she had a notion those things might not sit well, and she wasn't inclined to make him lose his temper again any time soon.

Without indication, he stopped and pointed to a door, which opened. Inside were a thousand hungry, yapping mouths and screaming ghosts adorned with bright beads. Lottie's back was flat to the far wall by the time a tug of his finger slammed it shut again.

"Wrong door," he apologised and she could throw on up the insincerity. "Nothing to worry about." It was his game to scare her like this, wallpapered to the stone and imagining herself as the next thing thrown in. He watched her with an unspoken laugh on his lips, then turned and moved on. If she didn't know better he was enjoying this.

"Where are we going?" she dared to ask, feeling that she might as well try.

"Just a little further," he said cordially. _That wasn't what I asked_, Lottie thought bitterly, but the ghost words didn't cross her mouth, and before long they drew to a stop. One door like any others, but when he tapped his toe it wound open.

"Entreé, mademoiselle," he beckoned. The room inside was beautiful, adorned with the deckings of royalty; a fairytale courtroom ripped right out of a storybook.

"Why'd you keep calling me that?" she let slip, flinching when his eyes fell on her. She preferred it when he wasn't looking.

"Ought I not?" he commented as smooth as cream and strawberries. "You are a _La Bouff,_ after all." Lottie was about as French as baseball, but that surely didn't bother him. Somewhere in her memory she'd heard his real name, but now it was only Shadow Man.

"What is this?" she asked brokenly, moving to the door but not trusting to step through.

"A place for you," he answered. "I thought you might like it."

"I..." she almost said that no she didn't; she wanted her _real _home and this wasn't it. She felt like saying he could be nice as he liked but she knew _he_ was the one who dragged her down here, and he wouldn't ever get her to play nice, but then she imagined that door of snapping faces and looked up at the Shadow Man, intimidating and angular. "It's fine."

"Only fine?" he jested. "Then it can be changed." He drew his hand across her vision and a hardened edge of nostalgia clawed at her chest. The room now looked just like her parlour at home, laid out in front of her eyes down to every piece of momma's crystal, freshly dusted and sparkling in the afternoon sun."Anything you want," he murmured like moonshine in a brown paper-wrapped bottle.

"I want to go home," she said, homesickness biting into her like a snake. A feeling like a bunch of bristles swept up her back to give her a shiver. She swore it was him, like he'd run a ghost hand up her spine.

"That I cannot do," he answered, and she knew he was lying. "You must be hungry," he led on, stepping into the room and gesturing to her table, which was now stacked with a sweet from every bakery in New Orleans. They looked perfect and delicious, but even the thought of eating only made her sick.

"No thank you," she said, remembering her manners unintentionally. For a moment he looked angry, then grabbed the tablecloth and yanked it. Lottie expected the food to go flying and his temper with it, but of course things were different here, and he shook out nothing but a sheet, not even a table underneath it.

"Are you just going to stand there?" he asked caustically, and a chair drew itself out like it was begging to be sat upon.

"Who... I mean, _what_ are you?" she said instead of answering him. It sounded worse than she'd meant it to, but he produced only a deep chuckle, like he could bear her no ill will.

"They call me many things," he answered. "Don't quite know the finer details," he rumbled, "but I know how I got here, and my duties."

"I see." She didn't. She stepped into the parlour, which now felt more roomy and pleasant, and looked around. The things seemed real, felt real, and even the oppressive heat was lessened. But it wasn't home. "Why can't I go back?" she dared to ask, and his expression hardened.

"You brought yourself here," he said sternly. "There are no simple ways out."

"For the last time, I never did," she pushed, and when he scowled she could've sworn the ceiling dropped.

"You wanted to be a princess," he repeated for the she didn't-know-how-many timeth.

"Yes, but-" Not like this.

"There are no buts with the spirits," he warned all too late. He almost sounded sympathetic. Tia told her about how he'd left the world, so he probably learned the hard way too.

"This can't count," she argued pathetically. "I'm not a real princess."

"Not yet," he murmured ominously. "You may understand in time."

"What if I don't want to?" she posed, and he gave a long sigh that could've deflated him like a hot air balloon. He didn't seem to be subject to the normal rules of how big or small he was meant to be. He was the shape he fancied being at any given point.

"Then you will stay in the dark," he resolved, and he had a sound of cigar smoke and broken promises, but she didn't doubt this one was true. It seemed wrong that he should be in _her_ sitting room, sprawling across the chaise lounge like so many black cats. His cane rested limply on the floor, as he tucked one hand behind his head, tilting his hat forwards.

Lottie realised she _couldn't _just stand there like a statue forever, and meekly shuffled towards a chair, testing it before she sat to be sure it wasn't going to go out from underneath her in a puff of malicious smoke.

"_Sure_ you're not hungry?" he remarked. She looked down to see a saucer and a cup of tea just perched in her hands as if they'd landed there like birds. On the edge of the plate rested a cookie so perfect she could see each shining grain of sugar.

"No," she insisted, looking around for a table that was missing right until she wanted it.

"It's been nearly a day in your world," he said. "You ought to be starving."

"A lady's never hungry," she recited. A little veil of excuses to get her out of accepting anything from _his _hand. You didn't just go round taking candy from strangers, and that went double for mysterious undead Shadow-men who'd just kidnapped you from the world.

He laughed like toffee about to burn and lifted his hands. Opening his palms like a box, he plucked out a bone white shape and put it to his mouth already lit. The smoke didn't drift like it should, but curled into letters and shapes, spelling out strange words she couldn't read, which he watched as if they were important.

"It's going to be a long eternity if you don't talk," he commented after a while. If _he_ was the only company to be had, there wasn't any worth having, Lottie thought to herself. But she couldn't just bite her lip and sit here like a poodle for the rest of her life.

"What do you want from me?" she asked, and he took another drag on his strange cigarillo.

"You have no idea who I am," he suggested obtusely.

"I do," she countered.

"You _think_ you do," he corrected, taking another puff, and reading the words with some interest. "You don't really know a thing."

"That's not my fault," she answered. "If you won't say anything."

"Oh, you want to know now?" he queried sarcastically.

"Well... I don't have a choice, do I?" she said stiffly. He smiled with unnerving mischief.

"You're learning," he taunted, getting up and sliding the cigarillo behind his ear, at which point it vanished. A tap of his heel on the floor and his cane had leapt up into his hand, and Lottie was just overwhelmed and lost and perhaps the tiniest bit fascinated. She'd been partial to magic shows when she was a little girl, but she had gotten too old and teased the tricks out of conjurers. Then it wasn't magic any more, just a clever lie.

"It's easier to show you," he announced, moving as he did; too skinny and angular to have such a presence like floor-length curtains. "Follow me." He tapped his cane and the door opened. She shuffled after him, clip-clopping in her bedroom slippers, and keeping her eyes in the middle of his back as she walked after him. She didn't know what she was doing, but she knew that this was better than screaming and crying and thinking he was going to rip her heart out and just _eat _it.

The hallway took a turn as it never had before, under an old, old archway. On the other side was a space unlike any she'd seen so far. Long, rough rocks stretched out for what looked like hundreds of miles, broken only by a vein of bright, gleaming white in the distance.

"What is it?" she asked, fixated on the shining bright river that cut through the land like decayed flesh.

"Styx," he answered solemnly. "Closer." He beckoned using long fingers, pulling her after him. It looked so far away, but actually it didn't take more than a minute to reach the banks.

The water itself wasn't water, but a mass made up of indistinct shapes, some with forms and faces, others blurry. She leaned over, looking in, and edged her toes right up to the bank. It was almost hypnotising. Something made her want to dive in, like a fishing line bound her to those waters and it was where she belonged.

She leaned over, then tried to pull back and found she couldn't. As if she'd been caught by the current, she tilted further and let out a gasp of fright. Her heel slipped, but before she went tumbling into who-knows-what, slick subversive arms had barred her path and pulled her back. One spidery hand was wrapped around hers, reeling her in like a fish on a hook.

"Easy," he jested. "This ain't no river you want to swim in." Her hands were tingling again under duress, and when she looked down she saw cracks spreading through his fingers. She let go quickly, only to reveal that where they had touched his skin was ashen grey and crumbling. As if he were embers burning away.

"Oh," she breathed, not knowing whether to back away from the river or him. Both seemed dangerous. Under her watchful eyes the decay slowed, and then his desiccated flesh began to re-knit, sewing itself back together. "What did I do?"

"Nothing," he dismissed. "The touch of the living corrodes the dead." She hadn't thought of him as _dead_, but supposed that it would be hard to be any other way.

"Does it hurt?" she found herself asking. Not out of concern but curiosity.

"Compared to what?" he suggested, and that had her fixed. Maybe you didn't feel anything at all if you were like him. "What do you think this is?" he interrogated, sweeping out his cane and stirring it through the misty waters. Something let out a scree and tendrils of white vaporous water started crawling up the polished length. He shook them off and set it back on solid ground.

She mumbled nothings, feeling dumb and knowing it was surely his intention.

"Souls," he answered for her, standing tall like a reaper or an angel. "Human souls."

"What?" she chirped, looking harder at the waters.

"That's why they wanted to pull you in," he explained. "You are one of them."

"But then... how is it, how can..." she had too many questions and not enough words to make sense of them with. "Well what in tarnation does it all _mean_?!" she burst at last, and he gave a soft chuckle that was rough like sandpaper and gritty and everything wrong and right in the world.

"This is where they come when they pass," he continued.

"_Here_?" she gawped. "But that can't be right... this isn't heaven." It couldn't be. _He _was here.

"That comes later," he said cryptically. "Your heaven is here, as is your hell. And everyone else's."

"But there's only one-" He held up a hand to silence her.

"This place is everything that is not the other," he announced like one of the stuffy teachers she'd had to sit through as a child. "All souls pass this way before they rest."

"So why are you showing me?" she pointed out, feeling like a rabbit who just hadn't seen the snare yet.

"Perhaps I want you to understand," he suggested.

"Why?" It was a very important question, she felt. He _had _kidnapped her.

"A lonely existence," he seemed to confess. "Can't blame a sinner for reaching out to the first person to come within his grasp."

"That was _me_?"

"You walked right into my shop and made your wishes," he reminded her. "I heard and answered. I thought this was what you wanted."

"To be dragged half-way to hell and scared outta my skin?" she retorted. "Oh you sure _do _know how to get a girl's attention."

"I don't have much else to offer," he said with an earthy scoff, suave and stylish as he stood on the banks of the river. Black against white. "This world is all I have." Something that had been tugging at the back of Lottie's head finally caught, like a ladder in stockings.

"Wait a minute," she said. "If this is your... if you're the guardian, or the prince, or, or... does that mean..." It was falling into place. "No," she gasped. "They can't-" This was all one big horrible joke, it had to be. "I am _not _gonna marry you!" she erupted. He grinned at her, a nasty, smug smirk that cut up his cheek like a razorblade.

"In their eyes, you would appear to have already made that choice."

* * *

_If you like or have any thoughts about the story, a few words tend to make an author's day, so don't be shy._


	3. III

III

* * *

_Persephone_

* * *

"I won't, shalln't, you can't make me... not _ever_!" Lottie found herself shrieking at a frankly alarming pitch. She'd been given some alarming news, granted, but the whisper of a flinch on the Shadow Man's face betrayed just how sharp her edge was. "Not if you were the _last _voodoo man in the world!"

Unfortunately, he laughed, leaning on his cane so that his shoulders seemed to pour in a straight line.

"I wasn't the one making wishes," he remarked dissonantly. "You wanted this."

"You stop saying that!" she barked and stomped her foot, only remembering after how Big Daddy used to call her a pony, igniting a shot of homesickness like a firecracker. "You can't make me marry you, you... you just _can't!_"

"You can't tell me what I can or can't do," he replied maliciously, and Lottie was so tormented that she did the one thing she knew she could do to him, and that was reach out to touch. With a moment of fury grabbing her by the seat of her pants she jumped out and pushed a palm flat over his face, shoving him away as flesh blanched and desiccated under her touch.

He staggered but didn't fall, though her fingers sizzled over his features and burned them away like old newspaper until she felt sharp, hard bone underneath. When she ripped her hands back all that was left was skull and furious eyes, even his lips burned clean off from his mouth.

It was awful and frightening, but Lottie didn't have time to go yellow because she had to run as fast as she could on a set of bedroom slippers. Before his temper brought hell down on her, she scooted off and swung back into the long hallway . If she could get far enough away maybe he'd give up, or she'd find a place to hide, or heaven forbid a way _out _of this horrible place.

Instead he laughed. From all the way back at the riverbank, he let rip a deep, echoing laugh. Then a shadow on the wall flickered and she was running into him with the force of a train.

"Not so fast," he announced, and she pushed backwards and wobbled, tipping clear off the back of her shoes. Before she crashed down on her backside something slipped between her hands and she grabbed out of instinct. It was his cane, an anchor to haul her back to the surface. His face had started to recover, leaving only a set of blanched streaks over each eye, blending with the whites. "That ain't no way for a proper young lady to behave," he taunted as he tugged her back upright.

"Get away from me," she burst, trapped and furious and sad at the same time. "You can't make me do anything. You can't even touch me!"

"No," he snarled, and raised up his cane like he was going to give her a big whack with it. She flinched but the blow never came. "I can't," he admitted, dropping it back to his side. "But you can't get out of here by yourself either." It was the first time he'd said it like that – with possibility.

"I _can _get out?" she seized. "There's a way?" His skin was finally closing up over the skull it had revealed, sealing around his eyes until they were whole once more. A blink and lashes appeared, irises still an unnatural shade of violet; insignia of his inhumanity.

"There might be," he commented. "But then, why should I tell _you _about it?"

"Hey!" she pealed. "That's not fair!" He was toying with her. It was all he'd ever done. Toy with her like his newest doll.

"You think any of this is _fair_?" he posed, leaning up against the wall and seeming impossibly long.

"You're making it a whole lot worse," she accused.

"Why should I do anything for _you_, Charlotte La Bouff?" he posed, looming in and setting the end of his cane under her chin, commanding her face to lift up to his, staring down like a wolf on prey. "What have you done for me? What _would _you do for me?"

"I... don't know," she mumbled. _Nothing_, she could say, but then talk like that wasn't going to get here anywhere but dead. Deader.

"There is one thingyou could do," he said slyly. Before she could ask, he held his cane aloft, the orb to her eye level, then with a flourish drew from it a shimmering glamour. It spread and enveloped her, painting the walls in shades of Lousiana and New Orleans until she was standing right there on the sidewalk watching the streetcars go howling by. It was almost real, except that no one had a face, they were all just fuzzy stock figures.

"I can't just _let_ you go," the Shadow Man began in a drawling tone, "but there is something else. You see, I'm a bargaining man by nature, and I'm open to the suggestion of an exchange." As the word slipped from his mouth, doors opened and sucked them into Tiana's palace. It was painfully familiar, and still so bright and shiny and new. All of Tia and Naveen's love had made it beautiful.

The lady of the house was one defined face amongst a sea of storefront dummies. Tiana looking the best she'd ever looked, so excited and pretty and shining like something had lit the biggest fire right inside her. Lottie's heart twisted as her friend walked right past her without noticing, moving to Naveen who now appeared from over her shoulder. The two embraced, hand-in-hand right through the space where Lottie stood.

For a moment the image was perfect, but then Tiana broke away from her husband, walking into an empty space, while a shadow was growing underneath her. It got darker and thicker, and then in the blink of an eye she was gone.

"What do you think?" the Shadow Man purred just behind her ear. "I'll take her instead of you." Lottie said nothing, paralysed as she watched Naveen turning, lost for a moment. It would kill him, it would break his heart into a million pieces and no one would be able to pick them up again. But then his ghost looked right into her eyes and smiled like _that – _the way he always had. She remembered when he had sort-of-almost been hers, even though that wasn't the real him. The real him had been kinder and sweeter and even better than the fake one.

"Someone would have to be there for him," he prompted. "Someone to take her place... and who better? He was _your _prince first." Naveen's smile was everything Lottie remembered, and her stomach knotted as he stretched out a hand towards her – as if to invite _her_ up for a dance this time.

But before he could move another step, his ghost was shaken up and erased. The restaurant vanished in a golden smoke, the glamour shattered as Lottie grabbed the Shadow Man by the arms and shook him and shrieked and screamed until her eyes blurred with furious tears.

"Why don't you just _drag me down to hell _right now!" she screamed in his face, bolder and stupider than she'd ever been before. "I would _never,_ not ever! No! You're an awful man, you demon, you- you- how couldyou even-" His arms were creeping up in patches of white decomposing dust, but she didn't care and she kept on shaking like she was going to knock all the stuffing out of him.

"Hands off!" he snapped, pushing her away. As he laid his palms against her to shove her back, they blanched and became ashy. He backed away from her like she was the dangerous one, not him, and gripped his staff tight, waiting for the darkness to knit back across his flesh. "So you don't like that deal," he remarked playfully. "How about-"

Lottie ripped her slipper off her foot and _threw_ it at him, for lack of anything else to hand.

"You wicked man!" she roiled, knocking off the other slipper and hurling at him too. It struck him in the chest and tumbled to the floor, not making much of a fuss in the process. She suspected that he didn't stop her because it made no difference to him, and he was at least entertained by her dramatics. "Don't you _ever _try to make a deal with me!" she warned.

"So I should just, how did you put it?" he queried patronisingly. "_Drag you down to hell?"_ He was leaning on his staff again now, shoulders almost at forty-five degrees.

"Well," she said uncomfortably, hearing her own words and recalling whose temper wasn't meant to be aroused or he'd burn her to a crisp. "Not necessarily..."

"I must admit," he announced, propping a hand on his hip. "I expected you to think about it more."

"Well, you had me wrong," she said huffily.

"Perhaps I have," he intimated. "Perhaps we've _both _been wrong about each other." He gestured to a door that hadn't been there before. It opened and led into a garden, or, it _looked _like a garden. Lottie knew it couldn't be because they weren't outside and that wasn't the sky, but to hell if it wasn't convincing. "Come along in and sit down," he invited as if they were turning a page fresh and going back to the start. "You must be tired after that performance."

"No," she insisted, turning up her nose. He strolled on oblivious to her protest.

"Fine," he said curtly. "Stay out there." He washed his hands of her, lolling over an ornate garden chair like so much silk. "One last word of advice, watch out for the shrunken heads," he explained courteously, gesturing with his fingers to something the size of an orange. "They love to bite."

"Wh-" she began, but then with a farewell wave he commanded the door closed and it slammed in her face. Lottie had all of ten seconds before she was shoving it back open and dropping into a folding chair with a very distressed air.

"Fine, Shadow Man," she glowered as she gave in. "Have it your way." There was a garden table between them, set with empty plates. As if making an offering, he reached up across and turned one around, like setting a clock. It filled with food as he rotated it, then he picked up an empty glass and shook it, at which point it became full of water.

"Don't starve yourself on _my _account," he excused, plucking a piece of bread right off her plate looking at it like he found it curious. "You have to be hungry." Her stomach did rumble, but she kept her hands in her lap. Lottie was sure right down in her gut that something was wrong with that food; in no other respects had he been a kind or gentle man. This couldn't be the only good thing he offered her.

"Still not hungry?" he queried, raising a cup to his lips and drinking. It looked like it could've been wine, although she wouldn't know for sure. They probably had real alcohol down here.

"No," she insisted, and he scowled, teeth pushed together like he was going to make them stick.

"Don't eat then," he snapped, his temper fraying like so much worn hallway carpet. "Starve. You'll die here just like you would in your world."

"Take me back," she said stubbornly. "I'll eat when I'm at home."

"You can't _go_ home," he murmured, and she believed it less and less each time he said it.

"Then you might as well _kill_ me," she proclaimed, and it was the biggest bluff since Big Daddy bet all her inheritance on a pair of hearts and the whole table folded.

"Why would I do that?" he replied, tipping his hat from his head and running long fingers through his hair.

"Because you want to?" she suggested obliquely.

"Do I now?" he answered question with question, playing her for whatever fun he got out of all this. It occurred to her that if he was lonely in this big old world with only shrunken heads for company, maybe squabbling with her was the best thing he had going.

"I sure figured that was what all the teasin' and scarin' and telling me I'm gonna die was," she indicated, and he made an indifferent gesture, like that was normal manners to him.

"You _are _going to die," he pointed out. "All by yourself, just like everyone else."

"Except you," she commented, and he narrowed his eyes at her.

"I'm different," he answered coldly. She suspected he didn't want to tell her just how different he was. Secrets were his only armour, if he couldn't even raise a fist to her.

"What did you ever do to get all this?" she asked spitefully. It seemed like immortality and being king of the underworld was a pretty rich reward for being an evil witch doctor and getting in debt with voodoo spirits.

"You think it's easy?" he suggested cruelly. "You know nothing."

"Doing magic tricks and scaring me half to death doesn't seem awful hard to me," she remarked haughtily. He shot her a smile like he'd cut one out of her cheeks to match, and scoffed in a way that seemed to leave the air ruffled.

"There's more," he was unable to resist saying, as Lottie could see he wore all his pride like a fine suit, even here, even condemned to undeath.

"I don't believe you," she claimed with blatant insincerity. He wasn't going to reveal his secrets if she _asked _for them. Now was she just a tantrum-throwing toddler who could only scream and cry, she knew how to lure and pry her wishes out of people when she needed to.

"All right," he said sourly. "I'll show you, just to shut you up." Tuned like a banjo. Lottie could've said there were easier ways of silencing her, but why would she point out a thing like that? She didn't know exactly where she was going with this, but the more she knew, surely the easier it'd be. Fighting wasn't going to get her anything with this man, she knew that – and he _had _once been a man. Big Daddy always said you caught more flies with honey than vinegar, and Lottie had sugar to spare.

He got up and she rose with him, but he didn't leave the room, garden... whatever it was. He walked to a gate and stepped through, an old-fashioned squeak crying in the hinges as they passed. He put a hand up to the scenery, and then from being full of depth and sense, it became flat as a painting, fingertips curled underneath it and swept back like a curtain. The facade with which he painted the walls of her prison came off, and the stood on the precipice of nothing, overlooking a huge chasm. In the distance Lottie saw cliffs of the sharpest, angriest kind. Like they'd been physically ripped apart by some demonic hand, and from one edge poured hot gold, shooting from the banks and spiralling away into an endless drop.

"What _is_ that?" she blurted with a defensive reaction that she hadn't realised she needed to make. Though her toes seemed to overlap nothing, she didn't feel as if she could fall.

"The end of the river," he answered divinely. Lottie was conspicuous of every angle to his body, like he was a bunch of shapes just slotted together, when he turned to her and asked, "want to see the bottom?"


	4. IV

_Notes: I love that Facilier is involved with Voodoo but I don't know enough to really feel like I could consider myself any authority on the subject, the world that we see here is inhabited with a mish-mash of Greek afterworld mythology, magic as we see in the movie and some of my own expansions. I wouldn't want to misrepresent a valid and historical religion and form of spirituality._

* * *

_Persephone_

_IV_

* * *

With a stamp of his cane, Lottie was underground. She knew that _he_ never asked questions except for rhetorical effect, but her stomach still lurched, even though they couldn't have actually gone anywhere. She peered up from the end of a great mineshaft, thousands of metres deep and perfectly round. As far up as she could make out the white waterfall poured in a manic spiral. As if they were at the bottom of a plughole watching the suds spin away.

Except if they _were_ at the bottom of a drain they'd be getting wet. The walls were peppered with holes, into which streams of the white substance passed, none reaching where they stood. There were thousands of them, some with only flashes darting through and others with a constant stream. It was the strangest and most amazing thing Lottie had ever seen.

The other thing was the _noise_. The reeling, screaming noise of a million voices all howling with every fibre of their essence. It was deafening. The most bone-chilling sound Lottie had ever heard.

"What is this?" she asked, and it wasn't strange that she could hear herself above the racket. It didn't seem as real as her voice. She figured that he was probably just showing her, rather than really bringing her there.

"The end of the river," he answered, voice a soothing purr over the anguished moan. "This is where souls are passed on."

"Where to?" she queried. They were like rabbits running into warrens.

"Anywhere," he answered solemnly. "Whether they have beliefs or not, good or bad, all go somewhere in the end."

"How?" she questioned. "If a bad person thinks they ought go to heaven then-"

"They are mindless," he interjected. "They're sent." He waited on her curiosity like a table service. She wanted to ask, but hated playing grandma's footsteps with him. Saying the words he wanted her to say, because they were the only ones there to grasp.

"By you?" she begrudged herself to ask.

"By me," he answered, looking up to the very centre where the waterfall split into rain, as if wrenched apart by a huge rock.

"You're doing _all_ this?" He nodded, seeming weary. "All the time?" She watched where he watched for a moment, saw the prism scattering of a million people going to their own afterlives or wherever it was they went. "Is it hard?"

"Exhausting," he answered, which was more forthcoming than she'd expected. "Most couldn't withstand the pressure. They'd break as soon as the power touched them." He appeared talkative for once, and Lottie wasn't one to stop him giving her more information about just who and what he was. "Others break in time."

"What do you mean, others?" she queried.

"Those who served before me," he explained. "Some last a short while, others for thousands of years. Until they can bear the load no more, and break apart like driftwood." She imagined him splintered across a shore, short sharp splinters of what a man once was. It was satisfying yet tragic, for anyone to be reduced to so little.

"When one person wears out, someone else has to take over?" she suggested, and he gave a silent gesture of approval. "Does it... hurt?" she inquired, thinking of the noise.

"No more than being torn by the soul from one world to the other," he answered. The screaming continued relentlessly; it seemed like it hurt them too.

"Don't they want to go?" she asked of the wails and anguish while souls disappeared like butter on hot bread.

"Would you?" he turned back on her. "Who is ready to die?" He seemed so calm. She couldn't really believe that it was anything to do with him, but there was a kind of ragged tension in his voice as well.

"You weren't," she found herself saying, words on expedition from her mouth uncharted.

"I'm not dead," he remarked, and she bit on comment about _this _being life for anyone. "A poor price for this domain," he alluded, and she couldn't help but agree. "Yet someone has to do it."

"And you lost the draw," she phrased. His laugh wasn't scorn or contempt this time, but riddled with warmth, like he cherished the moment in which she gave him humour. For a second more and less than pitch black.

"Not all titles are desirable," he returned, light dying until he was hard and cold once more. "_Princess."_ Ugly reminder of her own snare. Poor rabbit Lottie with her foot in the wire.

"Don't call me that," she said with a tone like the edge of a hatchet.

"You and I are not so dissimilar," he indicated. "Neither of us wanted to come here, or the roles we were given."

"We are _not _the same," she shot. "I didn't get into debt with bad spirits or try to enchant or murder anybody."

"What makes you so sure?" he said with a more foreboding sneer. "You went to a fortune teller, gave her money for her service. That's black magic on your hands too."

"It's not the same," she fought.

"Isn't it?" he spat like bullets off his tongue. "The spirits think they've done you good service bringing you here. To them _you _owe the debt."

"What?" she fumbled. "That's-"

"Not every girl gets the chance to become Lady of the Underworld," he explained. "They see it as power and opportunity. And all you had to do was ask for it."

"But I don't _want _it," she retorted.

"Too bad." He reeked arrogance and hauteur. It was all he could do to feel better than _her, _the one audience to his imprisonment. "You should be more careful next time you go asking for wishes in the wrong places," he advised.

"So the spirits idea of a fair deal is marrying _you_?" That was like winning a lame horse.

"That's your part of the bargain," he replied. "There are those who'd take a life for what power is offered to you."

"Then find one of them and _they _can do it," she declared.

"I don't wantone of them!" he snapped suddenly, and that caught her. Did it mean he wanted her? Or did he just want to torment her?

"What _do _you want?" she felt bold enough to ask.

"Don't ask me that," he said bitterly.

"Why not?" she put to him. "Because I couldn't possibly help?" He flicked eyes sideways at her, like that was maybe exactly it – or exactly the opposite. "What if I could?" she put to him. "If there was something... anything I could do for you."

"Why would you want to help me?" he pointed out, and with a spin of his cane their illusion was gone. They stood in an empty chamber once more, no waterfall or screams or magic at the end of the tunnel.

"If you let me go," she reminded him.

"I thought you didn't want any more deals," he pointed out acutely.

"Well I don't much like the sound of staying down here and dying either," she retorted. He'd made it more than clear what would happen if she stayed. Perhaps this was the way he was planning to run her into a deal, she thought, but what choice did she have?

"Bargains require sacrifice," he stated. "You should know that much at least."

"Yes, well," she fumbled. "If it was only a little one."

"You have a tall order," he explained. "It ain't no easy thing, what you're asking."

"You're the Prince of the Underworld," she asserted. "With all that power, surely you could send _one _sweet little girl back up to the surface again." Her flattery skills were still in place, that much was obvious. Whoever he was, the Shadow Man had once been a real man, and men could be sweetened.

"Well," he purred, and Lottie was both intimidated and desperate. "There might be a way... but you won't like it." He was enjoying it too much. He wanted to scare her, to make her so unsure she wouldn't take it. He was baiting her.

"If it doesn't hurt anyone, I'll like it," she insisted. She couldn't exchange, not another girl in her shoes, but even a crooked deal that got her out was something. She _would _be out. "As long as I go home."

"And is it what you _truly _want?" he put to her, fingers laced together and a cunning look in his eye. She knew those words were important now, but she asked herself, what choice did she have? Stay here and marry him?

"Yes," she answered with a stillness like swamp water. "It is."

"Then the deal is done," he announced, and rose up out of his seat in all of his height like a late afternoon shadow. "You'll have to come with me." Lottie shuffled out of her seat, feeling very unsure as she followed him out the door and a long way down the corridor. With each step she became less and less certain of her decision. But she was going _home_, she told herself. That was worth anything.

"Why is it so far away?" she asked after a good long stretch of pacing behind him in her little slippers going nowhere.

"This is a place that must be reached on foot," he stated. "Patience, girl." She buttoned her lip and traipsed along in his shadow, noticing that the ground was slowly rising up. Eventually they came to another archway, this one even older and more worn than the first. Inside it was a cavernous room carved out of clean black stone. It reminded her of a cathedral.

"Is this it?"

"Oh yes," he purred, and seemed torn between resignation and happiness. Maybe he didn't want to let her go, she thought – if it meant being alone again. "Stand right there," he told her, pointing to a large engraved circle in the floor. "I have to get a few things ready."

"Wait," she called out, and he halted mid-turn. "What's the price?"

"Why must it cost?" he put to her saccharinely.

"Of course it does," she spat. "Everything has a price. Before you said there was no way out."

"I lied," he said simply.

"And why _aren't _you lying now?" she rounded on him, and a twitch across his expression, like the beat of a bird's wing, made it seem almost like he was impressed. That she wasn't as stupid as everyone took her for on looks.

"You said you would help me," he remarked.

"I said as long as no one got hurt," she reminded him.

"That much I can promise," he stated. "You're going to help me just by being back up there."

"How?" He didn't answer her, locked his secrets with a padlock glare and smirked.

"Don't worry about _doing _anything," he assured her. "Just go about your vapid little life." Lottie scowled but didn't spit; she couldn't fight with him now, when he was so close to letting her go. From the perspective of a yawning stomach and fear-shivers and being tired and confused all of the time, anything seemed like a fair price to get back out.

"I have to get a few things ready," he excused, gesturing to an inlay in the centre of the room. "Stay right there."

All this time Lottie had accepted a quiet knowledge that what she saw and what the Shadow Man _were _were two different things. His surroundings and appearance shifted in the blink of an eye. So when he fell into shadow and emerged a different thing, her breath was scared stiff in her throat, stuck there like hard candy, but she had expected it as well.

He hadn't really a body any more, just pitch black space that was defined with sharp edges of white; hard and slightly shiny, as if they were bone. His eyes weren't eyes but pinpoints of purple light set inside empty black space.

"Stay cool," he soothed just as fight or flight was telling Lottie to run out of there as fast as her gams could take her. His voice was the same sonorous drawl, and that reminded her it was only his appearance. He was no scarier now than he'd ever been, she just had to get past the outside. "Are you ready?"

She might've said _'as I'll ever be_' had she had more voice in her, but instead she nodded, church-mouse in the wrong kind of church. He clapped his hands and then cupped them, and inside sat a golden goblet full of red liquid.

"Drink," he said authoritatively, and extended the cup towards her. She had refused anything from him up until this point, staring at the cup like it might hold her blood.

"Will I really go home?" she asked, feet feeling rooted into the stone floor.

"By all my power, yes," he swore, and it wasn't worth much from him, but it was the only thing she'd get. Lottie had to take a leap of faith. She took the chalice and held it in both hands, looking down into the murky depth and then putting it to her lips. Sweet wine,_ real _wine, that was warm down her throat. She took three sips then pushed it back, leaving some in the bottom.

"That's enough," he asserted, reaching to take the cup from her. When his hands crossed over hers, the tingling that had accompanied his decay was gone. Although he looked like an undead creature, he felt as any person would. The inky substance that made up his flesh felt like skin, warm and firm to the touch. And no longer did he turn to ash and corrode.

"You're not-" she began, and then he'd closed the cup back up into his palms and instead twisted skeletal fingertips in the bowl of his palm.

"This is what you wanted," he reminded her, but when he extended one of the spider-like limbs to her face she flinched. " Be still," he demanded, and she grit her teeth and went rigid as he laid his hands onto her face. Although his eyes were points of light and he had no nose and his hands were bones, if she looked hard enough she could just make out his face underneath, like it was a shadow that had been pushed far to the background.

He drew his fingertips in sweeping bags under her eyes, then along her brow, like he was painting. She watched him return fingertips to his palm and twist them, like he was smearing colours from a palette, and wondered if it wasn't exactly what he was doing. He placed intricate lines across her temples, her cheeks, gentle fingertips encircled her eyes like touches of rain, and she'd almost forgotten to breathe she held so still under his command. With butterfly touches he coloured her, one final swipe covering her lips like a wax seal. She felt soft under his touch.

"What's all this for-" she queried, but he shushed her, laying a thin silver blade to his lips in lieu of a finger. He didn't speak, and she had the feeling that meant they were both supposed to be silent. When he let the blade fall, he drew it down instead of away, crossing hidden lips that split and released blood so red it seemed to glow.

Then he took one hand and rested it under her chin, tilting her face up to his. She swallowed, and almost choked on the anxiety as he put the other side of the double-edged blade to her mouth. He was close, but his presence didn't exude the fear it often did. She didn't flinch as he drew the blade downwards and made a shallow cut over both her lips. Something to match.

With a twist of his fingers the knife vanished, and his hand was left empty to take hold her cheek, a gentle grip that still would not have let her move away. Not that she tried to, when he leaned in and pressed his mouth to hers.

Truth be told, it was not Charlotte La Bouff's first kiss, but it certainly was the first for a lot of things; girls like her didn't kiss men like him. She ought to have seen it coming, though it seemed both a surprise and inevitable. It wasn't actually a bad kiss, like she might've thought had she considered it beforehand – probably because he had wanted it to be so. She was his puppet and he had hands on the strings, holding her to him and releasing her when it was done.

When he stepped back, hands no longer cupping her face as tenderly as any man might hold a woman, she was drawn from the daze.

"Now." With a jolt he threw out his arms, and from him flew a tremendous fog, lights filling the toneless cavern. Whipping mists circled them, showering everything with blinding colours and intense patterns Lottie had never seen before and could barely comprehend. A roaring like wind filled her ears as he backed away from her, the circle below her feet now illuminated in millions of interwoven glyphs.

Through the haze she could just make him out, standing beyond the boundaries with his forearms crossed and held up at her, palms facing out. As the whirlwind raged, his shadow stretched out from under his feet and reached for her, grasping its long fingertips through the pulsing signs and curling around her feet. She could actually _feel_ the hands, and looked down to see dark fingers encircling her shoes.

In a split-second he turned his hands over and snapped his fingers. There was a click so loud it hurt Lottie's ears, and everything vanished.

* * *

_Yeah this is one of those **kissing **fics. I am not sorry._

_If you're enjoying or having any distinct feelings about this story, drop a word into the review box or better yet, tell your friends! PaTF isn't a big fandom but I'm sure it has a lot more fans than active fandom members! If you'd like to find me on tumblr, it's .com. Thanks for reading!_


	5. V

This one's a bit longer than usual so enjoy!

* * *

_Persephone_

_V_

* * *

Charlotte woke up dazed and confused in a alleyway drenched in New Orleans midday heat. She blinked, shook her head, and as soon as she tried to move her feet her knees became jelly. She tumbled down onto them with an aching yawn in her stomach and a dizzy spell, like she'd started feeling all the fatigue and pain and hunger that she'd forgotten at once. She rubbed her face and pulled back a hand covered in smears of black and red, then took a deep breath of humid air and pushed herself to her feet.

Her slippers made awkward clapping noises as she shuffled wondrously through the world again, overwhelmed and confused and with something drying on her chin. There was only one place she was going to go from here, and the lunchtime rush was about to start.

Even in the midst of a rush hour, everything stopped in Tia's Palace the moment Lottie walked in through the door looking like a dog's dinner. There was a moment of silence, then a long, desperate cry.

"LOTTIE!" Tiana flew out of the kitchens like she was on Naveen's skates and hit Lottie so fast she fell right over backwards, only to be caught by a puzzled butler. "Oh Lottie is it you, Lottie? Oh my stars-" Tiana rushed, and in no time at all Naveen was there to steer them away from the puzzled crowds and into the kitchen where half of the New Orleans fashionable weren't staring with open mouths.

"Say something," Tia urged as Lottie was draped into a seat.

"Can I have a drink?" she asked in a hoarse voice, and Naveen was off before his feet could leave the floor, returning with a pitcher of cold water and a bowl of warm. In no time Tiana had a rag in-hand and was wiping Lottie's face like she was a messy toddler who'd gone and gotten himself covered in chocolate.

The water was cool and unbelievably real, but as she drank it sloshed into her stomach and made her feel nauseous.

"How long has it been?" she asked next, hands shaking.

"You've been gone four days," Tia answered, back to being always-on-the-ball-Tia. She could hear Naveen in the back somewhere nearby, probably sending a message to Big Daddy to tell him she'd been found. "What happened, Lottie?" she begged. "Was it... _him_?" Without the strength to use her voice, she nodded, and Tia's heart broke in front of her.

"It's okay," she soothed, putting her arms around Lottie. "You're home now."

By the time Big Daddy arrived, she'd been cleaned up and given some plain porridge to fill the gaping hole in her stomach and Tia had washed all the unspeakable paint off her face and she looked like a normal girl again.

She hadn't been the only one starving herself apparently because Big Daddy looked ten years older and a belt size thinner. He was in floods of silent tears, running down his cheeks as he scooped her up and held her like she was just a baby again. It took a few more meals, some of Tia's very _best _chicken soup, and a lot of sleep before she felt totally right. She realised upon reflection that she'd passed out and woken up while she was in... that place, but had never actually slept. No wonder she was tired.

Of course, when she'd recovered was about the time questions were asked. Everyone knew that she had been kidnapped, but without ransom no one knew what to do. When Big Daddy held her hand and asked her who did it, and what happened, Lottie swallowed her guilt and told a lie.

_'I can't remember, I forgot, it's all a blur, I don't remember,' _she repeated until a bird could sing her song just as well. Even though Tia gave her shifty looks, she didn't say anything either. Who exactly would believe in her story anyway, and even if they _did _there was no way of busting down there to bring the Shadow Man to justice. He was unreachable.

And, though Lottie didn't say it to anyone, he'd sent her back. He _had _sent her home.

While she'd spent the first couple of days in bed, in time the fidgets were back in her feet and she was ready to get up. She convinced so many people she didn't remember that she almost didn't. It was a bad dream, some distant strange thing that wasn't her real life, and didn't really happen. Soon she only had a faint line across her lips to tell the tale, and even that disappeared under lipstick.

When she at last got herself out of bed and washed and brushed her hair and put on a nice dress, everything seemed like it was back to normal; perfect and bland. Then she stepped out on a sunny day and saw his shadow. It ought have been _her _shadow, but there under her feet it still clung, now standing tall and aloof like it was on sentinel duty.

"Oh no," she gasped, looking down at it and then darting glances around to see if anyone else noticed. "Not you," she hissed at it, and the shadow tipped its top hat at her. "Get outta here!" She knew that curses were useless really, but it felt better to say.

He'd said there was a price, and this was surely it. Except no one seemed to notice the shadow that didn't quite fit her, and Lottie got to thinking maybe she was the only one who saw it. Perhaps the whole thing was in her head. She wasn't sure if she'd rather be crazy or really abducted by a supernatural prince of darkness, but at least if she was losing her mind she could probably get it back. If _he _was real, she wasn't going to shake him off with a parasol and some harsh words.

She wasn't sure if the shadow was really him or something that was under his power. It seemed to watch her, sometimes taking a shape that was like hers, other times crawling around like a serpent. She didn't like it, but it became easy enough to ignore.

Tiana noticed it when it tripped up one of her best waiters and sent him flying with a tray full of desserts. Lottie hissed and scolded it, but the thing only grinned. She knew it could interact with this world, but on the whole hadn't done anything worse than pinching ankles or pushing people out of her way in crowds.

"What _is _that thing?" Tia gasped as Lottie stomped on it to make it behave.

"It's... um... see," she began awkwardly. The shadow stretched out underneath her and doffed its hat, resting on an iconic cane.

"It looks like _him_," Tia observed, and in a flash the shadow swung over her and flipped up the hem of her skirt. She hollered and Lottie paced back, pulling it away from Tia and driving her heel right into it. It twitched, as if feeling something, and backed away. "How long has it been there?"

"The whole time, I think," she remarked. "Really, it's not so bad. He doesn't like rainy days." Not enough sun to cast a shadow. Then it just skulked under her heels like a normal shadow would.

"It's a _he _now?" Tia challenged.

"I don't know what it is," she replied. "What am I meant to do, Tia? He said that magic required a sacrifice, and... well, I don't know how this stuff works." Tiana was quiet for a moment, a bubble of peace in her busy life, hid out in the back away from the chefs and frantic waiters. Even she had to take a break sometimes. Sat on a high stool with a dress far too pretty to be covered in flour – Naveen would be so disappointed – she frowned into her hands.

"I know someone who does," she responded at last. "We're going to need a boat."

That was how she, Tia, Naveen and that Alligator all ended up on a wobbly raft in the Bayou going absolutely nowhere. Naveen seemed cheerful, playing his ukelele and singing like he'd no cares in the world, but it felt a little forced. Tiana was worried, not least because they were lost.

"I swore it was this way..." Tia mused to herself. "Naveen? Does that log look familiar to you?"

"They all look familiar," he answered soothingly. "They're logs. They look like logs."

"That's _not _what I meant," Tia answered, poleing them through the swamp as Lottie swatted away all sorts of flies. "I swore it was this way."

"I imagine she only likes to be found when she wants to," Naveen commented, then took a look out the corner of his eyes at Lottie.

She hadn't really agreed to go on this trip so much as been forced into it by Tia at risk of having to explain to a lot of people why she had a shapeshifting shadow-creature following her around. Mama Odie would know what to do, Tia insisted, Mama Odie would know what she needed. That would be convenient, Lottie thought, because she sure as sugar didn't know.

In spite of warnings, she was stillsurprised when they eventually found the boat hanging out of a tree and the pintsize old blind woman who lived in it with a world-weary snake.

"Well if it ain't Mr. and Mrs. Froggy!" the white witch cackled as Tiana knocked and poked her head through the door. "Come on in and pull up a lilypad!"

"We're not frogs any more, but thank you, Mama Odie," Tiana said politely. "You see, the thing is..."

"You came here for my help," the old woman cut in. "I'll hear what you want, but I'll _tell _ya what ya need," she chattered while obliviously spreading butter on her snake's head.

"See my friend Lottie-" Tia began, but as Lottie stepped over the threshold everything went quiet. Not just that they stopped speaking, it was like the whole volume of the swamp was turned down. Mama Odie's hands hung in the air like bodies from a gallows, and then she turned to look straight at Lottie, even though she couldn't have seen her.

"Mrs. Froggy," she began ominously. "Just _what _are you doing bringing me the Baron's wife?"

"Baron?" Tiana echoed.

"_Wife?" _Lottie yelped over her.

"You mean you don't know it?" Mama Odie squawked. "Oh my. Well if you ain't been pickled like a possum. Get in here, girl, let me take a look at you." Lottie shuffled over and was no sooner in grabbing distance than Mama Odie yanked her like a bellrope and clapped both wizened hands around Lottie's face.

"Is it... bad?" Lottie mumbled with thumbs over the corners of her mouth.

"Hoooo-weeee," Mama Odie whistled.

"Ma'am?" Tiana intervened. "Lottie's shadow-"

"It ain't no shadow of hers," Mama Odie answered. "Get outta here, rascal," she barked at the shadow, which scuttled out from under Lottie's feet as if it'd always been able to, and hid underneath her cauldron.

"What did you mean when you said... _wife?_" Lottie dared to whisper, sort of wishing she was on her own and didn't have to have her best friends hearing about the shady deals she might have made to get back topside on the world.

"You're as pink as a piglet," Mama Odie clucked. "You didn't realise what it was?"

"What?" she puzzled. "I mean..."

"Just what was going through this head when you made a blood pact with the Shadow Man?" the sage asked.

"A _what?_" Tia called out in fear, hovering over Lottie's shoulder. Naveen seemed to be quietly lurking away from the action, like a wrong step would turn him back into a frog.

"I didn't make-" Lottie denied, but Mama Odie was having none of it.

"Did you kiss him?" she challenged like she knew exactly what the answer was, and Lottie bit her lip right where the crime had been marked, and went awkwardly warm in the face.

"Well..." she began.

"_Kissed?_" Tiana said, hand fluttering her mouth like she had to hold the screams in.

"Now hush, Mrs. Froggy," Mama Odie cut in. "If you go bringing the Lady of the Underworld into my house, you'll quiet up and let me talk." Then Lottie felt the attention rivet back onto her, and knew she was expected to answer.

"I... he said he was sending me home," she mumbled, and then felt the compulsive need to add, "and he did."

"Didn't he just," Mama Odie retorted. "This is a fine mess." She finally let go of Lottie and moved over to her bathtub, reaching into her sleeve and pulling out a handful of dust. "I don't want to do this, but a direct line's only thing for it," she declared, throwing the powder into the swirling liquid, which lit up with a violet flame and then went still as a mirror. Lottie felt something tug at her stomach, and then the voice.

"_Well well well, Mama Odie," _he said, and it _was _him, no mistake. Tiana and Naveen both paled and moved together, hands knotting like old rope. However, Lottie felt strangely calm. Perhaps because she knew he couldn't hurt her. _"To what do I owe the pleasure?" _

"What in great name am I doing with your wife in my shack?!" she hollered. "The forces are going to have hell for you about this."

"_I'm there already," _he answered, just the disembodied voice, but Mama Odie leaned over the tub like she could see into it – if she could see anything. The snake seemed to think she was going to fall in.

"And you thought that sending her up here was gonna help? There ain't no magic up in this world that'll get you out," she scolded. "Ohh, you've put a fierce tilt on the realms by letting her go."

"_She's mine," _he declared so surely Lottie could've up and fainted. He said it like it was true, like anyone should believe him. _"I can do what I want with her_." Which sounded full of terrible, scary things but then Lottie remembered that what he'd done was send her home.

"Throwing her back here ain't gonna find you nothin you want," Mama Odie warned the milky liquid. Lottie dared to creep closer, thinking she might catch a glimpse of him from within.

"_Can't help but try," _he replied indifferently. _"When you're doomed, options look appealing."_

"You should know better than to go and take wives if you're not gonna keep them," Mama Odie insisted.

"_I am keeping her," _he answered, and Lottie was just close enough to peek over, but she saw nothing. Only swirling mists. _"She's going to help me."_

"Like heck I am!" she squealed, and the turning of the waters abruptly changed direction.

"_Sweetness_," he said in a patronising tone of hot chocolate and false charm. _"It's been so long."_

"Don't you call me that!" she yelped. "You never told me! You never said- I said I _wasn't _going to marry you! You tricked me!"

"_You wanted to go home," _he reminded her. _"I told you there was a way, but you wouldn't like it."_

"I thought that meant having your stupid shadow follow me around!" she retorted.

"_Is it really so bad?" _he taunted. _"I told you what you wanted required sacrifice."_

"It _is _so bad!" she belted. "You rotten liar!"

"_I never lied_," he remarked. _"Failed to tell the truth... sure." _His shadow, sensing its master, had risen up and was cast out on the wall cackling with its snake-tongue waggling. Lottie was full of hell and that was as close to him as she'd get.

"You can stop that too!" she snapped at the shadow, reaching out and grabbing it by the neck. It struggled, then started flapping around, and it was only when she heard Tiana asking how she was doing it that she noticed she was holding a piece of thin air where the shadow might have been, were it actually real. She let it go and it slumped to the floor in a noodley mess, while an echoing laugh came up out of the cauldron-bathtub.

"_Still fired up," _he taunted. _"That's my girl."_

"I am NOT your girl!" she screamed, and the grabbed the nearest thing to hand – a big wooden stirring spoon – and swung it with all her might at the side of the tub. The pot rang like a bell, and she could've sworn she heard a faint groan, like it'd rang through his ears as well.

"Let's have some order," Mama Odie interluded in the chaos. "You have to take her back."

"No!" Lottie protested. "Please, Mama Odie!"

"_I'll take her back when the time comes,_" he answered calmly.

"If you made her your-"

"_She had but a sip of wine," _he interjected. _"She ate no bread, no meat. Even you know that means she isn't bound, old woman."_

"Well... sips still count," Mama Odie countered, becoming thoughtful. "The Spirits must be appeased."

"_They're appeased having me here," _he countered, and Lottie – maybe only Lottie – could hear his bitterness.

"Oh you don't know a thing, Shadow Man," Mama Odie insisted. "You think the Gatekeeper can just go and pluck a wife for any old reason? They let you because it's important. It's what you need."

"_Need?!" _he bellowed through sarcastic laughter. _"Such concern from them is rare." _Mama Odie was tutting like she was trying to suck toffee off her back teeth.

"You're as green as she is," she cawed. "You snatched her, an' you kissed her, an' that means she's yours. You take her back when the time comes."

"_Three months," _he lobbied. _"For three sips."_

"How about _no _months because you tricked me," Lottie cut in abrasively, but she had a feeling that Mama Odie wasn't on her side.

"Little Lady, you don't realise how much of an upset you bein' here brings the spirit world," she announced. "You're chock full of magic from there, an' you just want to go dancing around New Orleans without a bye or leave."

"_She won't cause trouble,_" he argued like he was pitching a case for her of all things. _"She's no ill will, even with all my influence."_

"I won't," Lottie pleaded, clapping her hands together. "I promise." She found it hard to believe she was 'full of magic' but then she also found it hard to believe she might be a married lady – in the eyes of the spirits, at least.

"Ohhh this is trouble," Mama Odie warned. "C'mere again, girly." Although Lottie didn't really want her head examined again, she didn't feel she had much of a choice, and allowed Mama Odie to ruffle her hair and press an ear to her skull. "She's got a good heart," she seemed to decide after releasing Lottie again. "You're lucky you picked this one."

"_What's that meant to mean?" _the Shadow Man retorted cruelly, like he was throwing out defences against some unforeseen attack.

"She can stay, but in nine months, she goes back," Mama Odie said sternly. "You pay the spirits their due, even if you cheated them."

"_Fine," _he said lazily. _"She had to return sooner or later."_

"You never told me that," Lottie called into the pot.

"_Of course not," _he declared obviously. _"You would've been upset."_

"I'm upset now!" she spat, but the pot only bubbled, like he was chuckling and the air was floating up through the viscous liquid.

"You'll see in time," Mama Odie foretold. "They have plans for these things, the Spirits."

"_Don't they always?_" he recited dryly, like he was well and truly fed up. _"Now, seeing as you're set on being so helpful to our matrimony, might I have a moment alone with my dear wife?"_

"I am not your wife!" Lottie hissed, but when she turned around Mama Odie had scooped Tia, Naveen _and _the aligator and shoved them all out the door with alarming force for a tiny blind woman. So there she was in a shack with a pot of magic juice and a disembodied voice.

"_That's better_," he commented of the silence, and Lottie just scowled. The shadow rose up off the wall as if to watch, and a smoke started to come from the cauldron. Within it, she could make out shining amethyst eyes and bone-white teeth.

"This isn't fair," she glowered.

"_Life ain't fair_," he answered. _"You wanted home, and I sent you. This was the only way."_

"So you say."

"_You notice how mad that old coot was?" _he commented. _"I rocked a lot of boats putting you out there."_

"So why did you?" she pointed out. "If it makes the spirits so mad."

"_I don't need to explain myself to you," _he answered cruelly, and wasn't that just typical. Lottie scowled and thought about spitting into the tub, though it wouldn't do anyone any good. _"Cheer up,"_ he added persuasively, voice rippling through the smoke. _"If I do get out, you can bet all your Big Daddy's money we're through."_

"We're not anything," she replied, firm that he couldn't make her his wife just by saying it was so. One little kiss didn't make you husband and wife, she convinced herself, and not even the spirits could make it so.

"_Tell yourself that," _he taunted. _"You'll be brought back all the same."_

"I am never going back!" she declared furiously, and hated his laugh.

"_You will be back," _he threatened. _"Even if the spirits have to drag you screaming that pretty little head off." _Like everything he said, the compliment cut deeper than cruel words would. Lottie was fed up and scared and she didn't want to go back, but him telling her she had to wasn't going to make it any better.

"Oh why don't you just... dissolve!" she burst, grabbing up the big spoon and splashing it into the tub, stirring furiously. With a fading laugh he vanished, and Lottie was left alone.


	6. VI

_Persephone_

_VI_

* * *

Back out on the Bayou, with Mama Odie's warnings and a whole lot of stuff that Lottie didn't want on her plate, it was Tiana who couldn't seem to keep quiet. Funny turn of events really.

"Lottie," she entreated almost immediately. "What did he-"

"I don't want to talk about it," she said flatly. "Please, Tia." Her friend looked like sour grapes, and Naveen was putting his back into it and poleing them along. Not enough that he couldn't hear, though.

"You got hitched to an other-worldly monster and you don't want to talk about it?" he posed, and had to choose all those words. _Monster_ went down worst for some reason.

"Would you?" she retorted, which buttoned his lip like a waistcoat.

"You can't let him do this," Tiana pleaded.

"But I can't make him stop," she responded. "So let's just pretend it isn't happening, okay?" She could bury her head in the sand well as any ostrich.

"But-"

"For me?" she entreated, and Tiana soon saw there was no doing about anything.

So that was what they did; they didn't. Didn't talk about it, nor think about it, and Lottie pretended nothing had ever happened, which she could maintain only as long as she wasn't looking at her pet shadow, who picked up her purse when she dropped it and pinched calves but didn't really cause all of that much trouble. It was like having a naughty dog strapped to the soles of your feet.

Life was almost normal, except it wasn't. Mama Odie had said she was 'full of magic' and that sounded like a bag of chaff because she was the last girl in the world who ought to be full of voodoo magic; which was why it happened so much by accident, like breathing.

Big Daddy was eating breakfast with her before heading out to work, polishing off cinnamon buns and drinking sweet tea with lemon. He'd licked his fingers and called for the chauffeur when Lottie almost dropped the teapot.

"Don't take the car today," she said in a sudden panic. Like someone had pulled out her eyes and put in the sight of another, she saw their car on its side, a wheel off, and so much blood on the street, baking in the sun like a slaughterhouse floor. She couldn't let him take the car today, she knew it as surely as her own name.

"What was that, honey?" he chuckled. "You want to take it shopping again?"

"I'm serious," she pleaded. "Don't. Please don't, I have a..." What could she say – a vision? A wild thought so real she could throw up? "I have a feeling," she conceded.

"What's gotten into you?" he queried jovially, still gesturing to the driver.

"Please, Big Daddy," she begged, almost at tears. She would lose him, just like she lost her mother. She _couldn't_ let him get in a car today. "Promise me."

"Ohhkay," he tittered, patting her on the arm. "I'll take a streetcar." He shook his head at the driver who wandered away, and Lottie could breathe again. The image faded, like it was being washed out.

At the time she hadn't thought about what it was, she'd just known with all her heart she couldn't let him get into that accident, so it was only later – when she was explaining it over lunch – that it struck her as strange. People didn't just get feelings like that. They didn't just _know_.

She looked down at her feet, and there the shadow waved, like it knew too.

The next time it happened she recognised it. One of the regulars at Tiana's Palace, a lovely widower who spend his hours looking for wife number two.

"Afternoon, Miss La Bouff," he remarked, and she leaned over to kiss each of his cheeks. But as her skin touched his she felt something in him, a dark rot deep down in his gut.

"Mr. Harris?" she murmured, lingering a hand on his arm, knowing the darkness was still there. "You should go see your doctor."

"What?" he remarked offguard. "Am I really looking so old?"

"I... no, you just... I have a feeling," she recycled the words, and they were received just as mirthfully. "I can't explain it," she fumbled, "but you have to go." She grabbed his hand in hers and held it tight. "Promise me you'll go see your doctor, Mr. Harris." He laughed and called her cute, pinching her cheek and eating his sweets and ignoring her advice like a light rain, but he was dead by the end of the week.

When Lottie was fretfully crying out her mascara in a cloakroom and squinting into a little mirror putting her face back to rights again, she told herself it couldn't be her fault and she'd warned him and maybe it was too late anyway, but she still cried for him and wished she hadn't known.

Then she felt those words rest around her like links on a necklace. She was full of magic. She had great power. He'dpromised Mama Odie she'd do no harm; she wondered what harm she could even do. Lottie didn't feel like magic, but she recognised when the curtains came back, showing her things that other people couldn't see.

Without thinking of it too much, she dispensed the notions and tried her best. Stop Big Daddy putting a bet on a bad horse, tell Naveen that the card player was cheating even though no one ever saw him palm a card. When they turned the con artist out and found a handful of queens in his pocket everyone was grateful, but not every time was so sweet as that. It was a shock the first time she heard someone who thought she was out of earshot speak of '_another of Lottie's queer fancies_' in a way that hurt like needles.

She'd been laughed off before and never taken seriously by anyone about anything, but that was _before_. When she hadn't known with every fibre of unwanted magic in her soul that someone's grandpaw was going to sleep this night and not wake up. She couldn't help but beg and squeeze their hand and tell them to be extra-nice just for tonight okay. She was called peculiar, and she was joked about, but she wished with all her heart that they were nice to him anyway.

In time the ridicule would make her sick, 'til she started to swallow her prophecies, buried feelings under sand until she was just fun flirty Lottie all over again. Even Big Daddy ignored most her 'feelings', and if he noticed her living shadow he never spoke of it, even when it was stealing cakes from under his moustache.

Then one day a boy came in on a train, not a horse, or a boat, or summoning himself out of the depths of hell, and Big Daddy said his name was Douglas and his daddy was Big Daddy's old college buddy and maybe Lottie could show him around New Orleans seeing as he was coming to the college in Fall. A contract written in invisible ink, and a prince with rusty hair and freckles and sweet round eyes.

He wasn't royalty, but his family had more money than ten Naveens, and he was polite to her and held her arm and took her shopping for dresses and hats and she didn't tell him that he had a ghost on his shoulder, even though he did and it terrified her.

She didn't see all that many ghosts; probably because _he _was sending them all to their resting places, but some slipped the net, lingering in the world like fog. The first had been a terrible fright, but by the time of Douglas she'd started to keep her secrets anyway. They seemed harmless, unable to touch or talk. Just hung mutely watching the loved ones they left behind.

Douglas's ghost was an old woman, probably a grandma, who watched him with sad eyes like rubbed out pencil drawings. Sometimes she turned to look at Lottie, which she hated, because she knew their kind never looked at anyone else.

"What's up with you?" Douglas interjected one day when he caught her staring at his companion a little too obviously.

"Pardon?" she chirped, caught out in her attention on the lost soul that coated him like faded cologne.

"You keep staring." He seemed a little impatient, and she wondered if he thought her rude.

"Oh, nothing," she evaded. The ghost was still staring at her. Well dressed, but sad, like her misery had run down her cheeks and dripped onto her chest, crumpling her nice lace and flattening her gown. "I was just... wondering if your family misses you."

"My family?" he echoed like the reminder that he had one was a surprise. "Well, I guess so."

"Who did you leave behind?" she pressed, seized by a sudden need to know who the woman was. "Your mom and dad, of course... and your grandparents?"

"Well," he remarked vaguely. "I left just after a loss in the family, so-"

"I knew it! It had to be her!" she cut in, overflowing with enthusiasm.

"Who?" he said bemusedly.

"Your grandma," she answered with a loose tongue. Too fast poured like hot tea, spilling on the saucer. "I mean-"

"Yes." His words were ice and steel handcuffs. "How did you know?"

"I... uh, my daddy told me," she lied with a quick tongue.

"Your daddy doesn't know," he replied stiffly. "I haven't told anyone in New Orleans."

"Are you sure?" she squeaked, more panicked by the second. "Then... it... must've been someone else, I'm sorry," she pleaded her way out, not even sure why or what she was apologising for. Sorry that she couldn't be honest about what spirits covered people like flies. Worse yet, his grandma was still staring at Lottie, even more openly now, with deep mournful eyes. Maybe she knew they were talking about her.

"Yunno, you sure do come over queer sometimes," Doug remarked with only half an air of a joke, turning away to a rack of shirts. His grandmother didn't follow him for once, as she would and should have done. She stayed to and stared at Lottie.

"What do you want?" she whispered at the un-person.

"Oh, I dunno, nothing too fancy," Doug called out obliviously, head buried in the rack.

"Can I help you?" she entreated the spirit.

"No thanks," Doug blithered, but Lottie was barely hearing him. The ghost had reached out her hand, like a silk scarf flying on a breeze. As the world went down like gas lamps on low, Lottie stretched her fingers. Never before had she been able to interact with the stray phantoms that lingered in his world, but as her fingertips touched to non-ones, a flash of memory invaded her head like a drill.

She saw and felt and heard a whole lifetime of joy and laughter and hard times among the good; falling in love and bearing children and growing old and sick and still loving. It all passed through her soul like she was a lightning rod, stopping her breath and heart for a moment of overwhelming light. Then, as the sun blast faded, a glimmer held on. Being frail and weak and dying, bedridden and knowing it was time to go.

"_I love you_."It was Douglas's voice, but not here, not now, to her. It was a hand clasped to a withered one, and hearing him and wanting so badly to open her eyes and let him know that she was still here, she heard him and loved him too, but being so very tired as well.

"Charlotte?" This time his voice was from the here and now, and Lottie blinked to see Doug swimming in front of her vision. "Are you crying?" she blinked and sent oily tears ebbing down her face.

"She loves you," she gasped violently, holding back sobs. "She heard you saying goodbye. She wanted you to know she was there."

"What are you talking about?" he retorted with subtle fear.

"She stayed to tell you she loves you one last time," she bled the words like that sad ghost had put a knife to Lottie's throat and cut it open to let her words spill out.

"Who? What is all this-"

"You _know _who!" Lottie sobbed, and Douglas's face showed that yes, he did. She couldn't bear to stay any longer, so she clapped her hands to her face and ran. She never saw the ghost again after that. It must have passed on when Lottie absorbed her experience, finally leaving with her final wishes like salt marks on a basin.

It was henceforth referred to as 'the episode' by Big Daddy, who spoke to her about it so Doug didn't have to. Of course, he'd never speak too harshly to her, his princess – spit on the word – but he explained that she'd given poor Dougie quite a fright, and while girls would be girls, best not to trouble him again with fancies and suddenly starting to cry in a department store for no good reason.

Never was it suggested that she was anything but hysterical, and she wanted to grab Big Daddy by his moustache and scream at him that she _wasn't _being silly, it was all real and Douglas should be _thanking _her, not saying she was nice but awfully peculiar for a girl of her standing.

At times it seemed like the shadow was her only proof that it was all real. It alone believed in her powers as much as she did. Sometimes when she had so many words inside her that they were going to bust out at the seams, she'd sit on a back porch and chatter to her silly pet about the magic that ran through the world, the ghost she saw on the streetcar and how no one ever took her seriously. She didn't know if _he _could hear her, but it didn't really matter. _He _was just part of her double life. Lottie the princess of New Orleans, and Lottie the so-called princess of the underworld. Only rarely did the two overlap, and rarer still did it bring her any joy.

For the longest time she hadn't thought about the hourglass on her calender. Nine months, they had said, nine months and she'd go back. She had swore she wouldn't. She had sworn she'd run and fight and scream herself sore and _make _them make her go. Except that as she wiled away afternoons talking to her own shadow – it almost felt like hers – she wondered if it would be so bad. At least she wouldn't be lying about herself so much. The Shadow Man knew what powers she had, because he'd given them to her in the first place.

Sometimes she wanted to give the power back, but then a voice told her that if not for it she'd have lost Big Daddy, and be an orphan with a big mountain of money and no family left. So she kept those secret thoughts like pearls, locked up and sealed and not to be shared, because who would or could ever understand?

Nothing really changed until Douglas proposed. She shouldn't have been surprised, but when over lunch he said 'when we get married' like it was the same as crépes, she smashed her cup on the saucer in haste to put it down. And then, for some stupid reason, she went and said something insane.

"I'm sorry, Douglas," she declared, "but I'm already married." Then it was his turn to drop crockery.

She hadn't meant to say it, but for just a second she'd stopped pretending. The argument afterwards wasn't pretty, but when Doug started to get mean, to call her names and shout, a sneaky shadow grabbed hold of his ankles and he went flying flat onto his face and bust his nose. By the time he was peeled up off the floor Lottie was gone in a storm of impetuousness.

That was about the time she started to accept it. Douglas had disappeared as fast as his grandmother's ghost, and Lottie was happy enough being alone. Although she didn't hear from Mama Odie, she didn't need to. Days and months slipped sands of time through her fingers, the date crawled up her stocking and she found herself thinking _'when I go back_' more than _'if I go back'._

With one foot almost literally in the grave, she had the wrong eyes for this world. She'd only wanted fairytales and romance and something more than marrying a Doug and having his babies and getting everything she ever wanted for the rest of her life. What she had was bitter candy, but she was chewing it all the same.

When there were only a few days to go she took herself to Tiana's palace for lunch, wondering in the back of her mind if it would be a long time before she ate this well again.

"Take a seat, honoured guest," Naveen flirted in his harmless way. "The Lady of the house will be right with you." As Lottie sat, her chair slid in behind her, pushed by the shadow that she was now used to having at her beck and call.

Then Tiana walked out and from the moment she laid eyes, Lottie was speechless. She knew, just by looking, just by feeling, that there was someone else with Tia today. Another soul. But it wasn't old or mounful, a shadow of someone passed on. It was the complete opposite.

"Oh Tia!" she cheered, bounding out of her chair and throwing her arms around her best friend. "I'm so happy for you!"

"Hello to you too," Tia tittered bemusedly, while Lottie backed off.

"I didn't mean to jump you, is it okay, do you-" she started to chatter, and then she saw the blankness of Tia's face. "You mean, you don't know?" she blurted.

"Know what?" Tia asked.

"You're gonna have a baby." To her it was as natural a thing to say as skies were blue, but Tia's eyes widened.

"What are you talking about?" she laughed. "I'm not pregnant."

"That can't be," she answered. She _couldn't _be wrong, it didn't make sense. "Are you sure?"

"Well yes, I..." she broke off, suddenly thoughtful. "Is this one of those things?" she asked carefully. The only friend Lottie had to believe her 'feelings' were more than just fancy. Even then Lottie was careful to share them, because she knew it reminded Tia of _him_, and she didn't need to be reminded. No one did.

"I just _know_," she said gaily, letting it sit and sink in like cold cream.

"I'm gonna have a baby," Tia repeated to herself, as if to test it, a smile growing like roses. She looked up at Lottie with eyes bright. "I'm gonna have a baby!"


	7. VII

He's bad, and he's _back _oh yes.

* * *

_Persephone_

_VII_

* * *

Lottie having a helter-skelter of a time with her feelings, in that there were a number of hotwires that took her from happy tears to out-and-out sobbing as fast as it took to blink. At first it was screams and joy and hugging Tia because she so happy for her she could gush, and then she remembered she was leaving and it poured out of her like blood. _What's wrong, what's wrong? _Tiana entreated as she noticed the broken pipes streaming down Lottie's face. They went out to the back, where she broke down completely and told her the news.

"I'm so happy for you, Tia," she wept into a stained napkin. "I really am."

"Then why're you sobbing so much?" she asked, and there it was.

"I have to go back," she said as steady as paving stones. "Soon." Less than a week, in fact. Tiana wasn't slow, and she caught up on it fast as fuse.

"You don't have to do anything you don't want to," she replied. "We'll take you back to Mama Odie, Naveen and I can... something will work, I'm sure of it."

"It's okay, Tia," she said sadly. "I... don't think I mind."

"Don't _mind_?" she echoed in fear. "You can't mean that."

"I've had a long time to think about it," she confessed, wiping her face. The wound was suturing now, the panic and fear healing in the face of someone else's worse fears. "It won't be so bad."

"But it's _him!"_ Tia shot.

"I know," she answered. "He won't give me so mmuch trouble."

"He dragged you into hell and made you..." She couldn't say the words. "Trapped you," she settled on.

"He can't hurt me," she stated without actually knowing if it was true or not. Maybe she meant that he wouldn't hurt her, rather than couldn't.

"That isn't enough," Tia fought. "Don't let him ruin your life, Lottie."

"It isn't like that," she replied, feeling like an ocean. She could sense life washing around her, and it was no longer so scary. "I have to go back, Tia. It isn't anyone's choice."

"Then make it your choice," she argued.

"I am," she responded sagely. "I'm choosing to be okay with it."

"Why?"

"Because you are the first person in half a year to believe me about something I can't prove is true," she responded. "I see things, Tia."

"What do you mean?" Even clever hardworking Tiana was so of this world that bedrock ran through her. No spiritual ribbons in her hair.

"These _feelings_ I talk about, they're all real," Lottie explained hesitantly. "I know when someone's going to pass. I see their spirits if they don't cross over."

"Like, ghosts?" Tiana surmised. "You see _ghosts?"_

"Basically," she confirmed. "That's why I'll return. The spirit world calls for me." She felt it stronger every day, like standing on a shore that was being washed out from under her feet.

"But _he _is the one who-" she began

"I know it's because of him," she interjected. "Shadow magic, or something like that," she explained helplessly. "I'm not scared, not really... it's like part of me belongs there too."

"But Facilier, he'll-" Any manner of wicked things, but Lottie didn't see it in her future. She felt safe, having bled the tears from the wound. To confess was to exorcise.

"He'll do nothing," she insisted. "He might be King of the underworld, Tia, but _I'm _Charlotte La Bouff!" She pronounced it like a rank and Tiana laughed like she might cry. They talked a lot longer, and Lottie told her how beautiful her baby was going to be, but when they said goodbye, it would be the last time in a long while.

She never told Naveen, knowing Tiana would fill him in and not having the heart for the same sad news twice; but when he hugged her he held her so tight, she thought that he surely must have guessed it. Maybe he knew better than his wife, who still thought of Lottie as her best and simpliest and sunniest friend in the world. Naveen had started to see the girl with power she didn't know what to do with.

Big Daddy was the next problem, but luckily she knew how to handle him. She started out talking about how he'd raised her to keep her word, to never back out on a done deal, then finished holding back tears, promising him she'd be back but that she really did have to go on a trip, a 'vacation' that she couldn't tell him about. She loved him but she had to hold up her end, she said. She'd be back before spring.

She didn't think he understood, but he hadn't really understood her since Douglas left, and seemed sad more than anything else. It was with a heavy heart that she packed a bag of things and dragged it across uneven cobblestones into the same backalley her life offrailed in. At least this time she felt as if she might be able to bear the weight. She walked to the centre of the square and stood there, nothing happening. Her shadow crept out from underneath her and seemed to look up in question.

"Well?" she challenged. "What are you waiting for? Get him!" As if sent on the words, it sunk into the cracks of the paving, and in a moment or two light flowed back out. Lottie cross her arms, took a deep breath and shut her eyes. It felt like sinking into a deep feather duvet, landing on firm ground at the bottom.

She could feel him in front of her even with eyes still shut, the same way she felt sickness or death or dishonesty, except he was sharper and stronger than all those notions put together. Like a sharp obsidian blade driven deep into the ground in front of her. His voice was the same sandy gravel, rough over things soft and delicate as herself.

"You promised there would be screaming."

Lottie opened her eyes, glad she'd taken the time to put on a full face of makeup. War paint. If he got to alter his appearance to look more intimidating, so could she.

"Maybe later," she responded. She wasn't sure if he was mocking her by also having his arms crossed over his body, but she felt like the silly half of a mirror.

"Why did you come back?" he asked. In spite of all the demonising she'd done in her head, he was only a man – a man possessed with power.

"I didn't have a choice," she answered.

"So you thought," he baited. "Are you sure?" He hadn't moved, and she wondered if it was because he didn't want to be the first to do it. If he was wary of her as she was of him.

"Yes," she countered. "I'm sure." She waited a moment, selecting her time like ripe oranges. "I'm your wife, after all." He hadn't expected that to come from her, and she was pleased to have shocked him. Yes, she couldaccept things she wasn't meant to, she could surprise him by saying it when he thought it was the last thing she'd do.

"Is that so?" he queried like he wasn't sure of it himself.

"All that power you promised Mama Odie I wouldn't use," she remarked. "It changes things."

"It does," he said almost approvingly. "I didn't think you'd notice."

"It's hard not to," she replied. "Ghosts aren't even the worst part of it."

"You saw them?" he questioned. She wondered how stupid he thought she was. "What was worse?"

"The worst thing is knowing someone's going to die in a day and that no one will believe you if you tell them," she commented, resentful now she could speak to the man who gave her this unwanted power.

"Oh, compassion," he tutted. "What shackles. The things you could've done if you were a little less pure."

"What's _that _meant to mean?" she retorted, and he gave a low chuckle.

"You can be the one deciding who passes that day," he commented. "Or close enough as makes no difference."

"That's awful," she spat. "I'd never."

"I know." He was sure with all the resolution of every preacher in New Orleans. He was absolute. As if he knew that it _meant _something, and Lottie was starting to think it did too. That it was her and him, and not anyone else. His eyes went down to the case by her side. "You brought bags?"

"Well, I'm not just going to stay in _one_ outfit for three months," she commented aloofly. "What kind of slob do you take me for?" He seemed amused, or perhaps that was just his face. "You can show me to my room." His eyebrows raised like his eyes had gotten too big for their space, but she held to her guns and let him be surprised at her bossing him around. She couldn't be sure he wouldn't hurt her, but he always seemed more entertained by her displays of authority than anything else.

"This way," he instructed, gesturing to the corridor that opened up behind them. She wheeled her case over uneven floors alongside him, keeping her head up. If she showed him inferiority or fear, he would use it. "Here you are, mademoiselle," he soothed, leaning against a doorframe which opened as if compelled to do so. The interior looked like an airy studio overlooking a foreign city, and what looked to be the Eiffel tower in the distance. Of course it wasn't anything like Paris, but appearances could be deceiving.

"You ought to stop calling me that now," she commented, wheeling past him inside and setting her case by an ornate dresser.

"What the spirits consider you and what _I _consider you differ," he replied neutrally. "Enjoy your room."

"Oh really?" she caught back like a fishhook, "because seems like Mama Odie and the rest of them think you should be responsible for your actions."

"What kind of responsibility is that?" he came back, voice of gasoline and sun-baked mud flats.

"I don't know how you did it where you're from, but in my world you don't just go and hitch up with a lady and mean nothing by it," she said with principles like pearls around her neck. She wasn't asking him to _do _anything, but a little admission would be nice. Considering he did all this to her, to deny it now was a sour peach.

"We're not in your world," he reminded her, striding up and seeming awfully big all of a sudden. "Are you suggesting I should behave as a man to his wife?" Lottie wasn't ten and she wasn't stupid and she knew _exactly _what he was talking about, and figured her mouth had been running terribly fast for some reason.

"Um, no, I just... uh," she fumbled, feeling a whole size smaller. She told Tia she could handle him, whatever he was, and maybe it'd been a big fat lie she made up on the outside to comfort herself. Then all at once he backed off.

"I have to go," he announced like an insult, turning from her as if the room was on a slant and he ran out like dirty water.

"What? Then what am I meant to do?" she asked helplessly, noticing the shadow stretch between them, like it wasn't sure of who to go with any more.

"Amuse yourself," he said curtly, and then he was gone and the door shut.

Looking to her feet, Lottie realised she was alone – truly alone, as not even the shadow had stayed with her now it too was back to its home.

"Well," she said to herself, wandering to her bed and dropping into feathery covers. "I guess that's that." She resisted the urge to cry; here she was on her own in another world, the only company in four fake walls and a pretend-comfortable mattress.

She held the tears back because she knew if she let them fall they would never stop, and she couldn't crumple up and die of homesickness and heartbreak. She just couldn't. She promised herself she was going to stick through this and go back.

Before she got here she'd convinced herself it would be different. That the forces that pulled her down here would be happy, but she didn't feel very much at home. The room was beautiful, but it was foreign. A stranger's home. Perhaps she could do something about that, she reasoned with herself. Paris was nice, but it wasn't her. She got up and went to the far wall, glossing over all the details that must have been imagined by someone, _him_, and putting her palms flat to the plaster.

"This place could use a little more space," she announced to absolutely no one, and then with a very determined shove she pushed the wall and it slid back like it was on rollers. "Oh," she chirped. "That was easy." She'd seen him do far stranger things to a room in far less time, so she'd reasoned with a loan of his power, she ought to be able to do the same. She'd actually expected more challenge, but it was just that easy. Anything she could dream of became real, or as real as anything or anyone in here ever was.

By the time _he_ returned Lottie was seven doors deep into building a dream-house that was quite literally made of dreams. It took no more than finding a keyhole that she wanted to be there to open up another room, then another after that, skipping down a long spiral staircase that opened up into a wide garden filled with midday sunshine like freshly-squeezed orange juice. The flowers weren't real and didn't smell, but they were beautiful and thinking of them distracted her from all the savage loneliness.

"Charlotte?" she heard her name from far away, racketing down the stairwell like a dropped dime. She didn't think he'd said her name like that before, but it was probably because he had nothing else to call her. She didn't know how long it'd been, absorbed as she was in arranging flowerbeds, but didn't leave her work when he slipped down the steps and into her garden like a tall drink of oil.

He loomed behind her and she made sure the sunlight blew his shadow backwards instead of over her, not wanting to be in his power. She could feel him without needing to look, a presence that was always there in the corner of her mouth, like an itch.

"You've been busy," he commented.

"What else was I meant to do?" she posed to her azaleas. "Curl up and die?"

"Perhaps," he insinuated, like maybe he wanted her dead. That way he could go and take another wife. Fat chance of that, Lottie thought stubbornly. She would live just to spitehim. "You worked out how to do all this?"

"Like it's hard," she dismissed, opening her hands with a perfect rose inside each one. She had once found his magic strange and fascinating, but now here it was in her palms, her fingertips. She felt his stare on the back of her neck like the beam of a magnifying glass. "What?" she ground out, still poring over each bud and petal as she breathed life into them and set them in the ground. They weren't alive, but she was. It could be enough.

"Nothing," he said resentfully, and she felt like grabbing him by the collar and shaking the secrets out like loose change.

"Some host you are," she mocked, and sensed his discontentment. Something was wrong about his aura, a prickly defence that was making him sour and humourless. He wasn't laughing like he used to. "I thought I was your _honoured_ guest."

"Before," he responded curtly.

"And what now?" she retorted, putting her hands to the ground and getting up, facing him. "Now I'm just an imposition?"

"Your presence isn't my choice," he stated frostily.

"Well it's not _mine _either!" she bolted. "The least you could do is be nice."

"Nice?" he scathed, mouth twisted in so many knots of anger it was a wonder he could speak through it. "What kind of _nice _would you like?" He was putting suggestions out there again, like she should be frightened. Like he could intimidate her by pretending to be a man. Well Charlotte La Bouff was a proper young lady and she'd _learned _what real men were.

"You're meant to be my husband after all," she spat defiantly. "So if you're going to do something, might as well _do _it already cause' I'm not gettin' any younger over here!"

He was going to have to stop underestimating her, because surprise was becoming too common on his face. Sure, she was a good girl and she didn't kiss boys like the French did or let anyone get fresh with her and she was still ready for her wedding day – if she was ever going to have a wedding – but she wasn't _stupid _and she wasn't going to pretend there was no elephant in the room if it was trumpeting all over the place.

"That sounds awfully like an invitation," he remarked cautiously, and she wondered how bad it would be. In etiquette classes she'd learned about how you were meant to be a good wife and the needs of husbands, how it was best to not think about yourself too much and if you were married up with a person who didn't quite appeal to you, well you just bit your tongue and put up with it Missy, because there were a lot more girls less fortunate than you who wouldn't get a rich well-landed man ready to put a baby in them.

"I'm not scared of you," she lied.

"You should be," he threatened.

"_Why?_" she shot, and that had him like a pickle in a jar. "I'm not afraid of what a man does to a woman." She'd heard enough and learned enough even if it was _him_, she didn't see how it could be any worse than the stories from New Orleans – and still, somewhere, she didn't believe he would really hurt her. Like the spirits had forbidden it.

When she looked him in the eye, he didn't move. He could've been carved out of stone for how still he remained, watching her like he was attempting to unravel all of her meanings in a big ball of yarn.

"That sure is one mouth you have," he indicated. Hot air, words without meaning. For someone so intimidating, he was a whole lot of nothingright now.

"Well it's _yours_," she declared ferociously. "So learn to deal with it!"

For just a moment the way he was looking at her made it seem like maybe he mighthave another thought in his head. Something that wasn't about shutting up or winning arguments or who was bigger than who. As if he were thinking of another thing entirely that they were tap-dancing around like prizewinners.

But he stood like an oak and didn't blow in the gentle artificial breeze she drew through the open room. She started to wonder if all his dark threats were empty as his soul, and maybe all it took was challenging him to do something about it.

"I'll leave you to your work," he said coldly, and before she could spit one curse more he was gone. All that remained was his shadow, Lottie's old friend, who lavished in the bright sunlight and flipped like a fish. She felt for some naïve reason that it liked her, and let slip a smile as she put her palm to the ground it spread across, like petting a kitty that wasn't there.

"You're my friend, aren't cha?" she said tritely. In here she was going to need at least one, and no prizes for guessing who it wasn't.

She'd noticed that time wasn't really the same in here either. She never seemed to get tired or even hungry, and without indicators it could be an hour or a day since she last looked up from her potting. It was both a relief and tedious, wearing her down like a grindstone until she was bored sick and couldn't bear the sight of another fantasy dream-room in a house that wasn't real, wasn't hers and wasn't where she belonged. She cursed herself for being so stupid as to ever think she might fit in here, and traipsed miserably back to the room that was falsely named hers.

It was the same artifice as ever, and Lottie's only real possessions were in her little suitcase, brought over from the real world. So she did what she might normally do when feeling lost and insecure, and put on some fresh makeup.

To start, she washed off all the old stale paint with a dish of warm water she could summon with thought, and reapplied a fresh coat of cheeks and smiling mouth like a china doll. Give herself glass eyes and pouting lips and watch him try to get an expression out of her. She was busy brushing out and re-curling her hair when he reappeared again. Like a moth he flitted in and out, wishing to leave but somehow compelled to return. Or perhaps he got bored as well.

"What's the point in that?" he suggested while Lottie was aggressively curling her eyelashes. She'd felt him come in, and could see the black cutout in the corner of her mirror. "Are you trying to impress someone?"

"Hop off your high horse," she notched him down a place or two. "I'm not doing this for anyone's benefit."

"Then why-"

"Maybe I just _like _to," she interjected. "Some people enjoy things other than kidnapping girls and trying to commit murder and acting mean an' scary all the time." He had a laugh like an engine just trying to get going.

"Your summary of my business," he demeaned.

"Did I miss something?" she remarked cheekily, rolling up her hair and pinning it in place.

"Nothing important," he declared, and that was a whopping lie because she remembered the waterfall and the souls and she knew he had some sort of place in that. When she made contact with Douglas's passed grandmother and sent her on, she knew to whom the spirit had been sent.

"If it's so unimportant, you'd think you could put a little more effort in to making me feel at home," she commented. This was some of the worst hosting she'd ever encountered, and that didn't even include the part where she was kidnapped in the first place. "I am your _guest _after all."

"That was the first time," he remarked begrudgingly. "I didn't invite you back." So he kept saying, and it was going staler than three-day biscuits. Lottie wondered who he was trying to convince.

"You made the deal that meant I _had _to come back," she countered,, "so tell me why that ain't as good as the same."

"You didn't even try to resist," he accused. "Did you get sick of real life? Crawl back to my door and see if you'll be treated like royalty."

"No," she denied fiercely.

"Forgive me if I'm not sold," he squandered insincere words on her. "From my side it looks like no one was giving _Princess _Lottie enough attention, so you thought to come back into my realm, seeing as the spirits conveniently bound us together-"

"_You _bound us together!" she shot. "Spirits didn't paint me up like Mardi-Gras and plant a kiss on me with a silver knife."

"I was getting rid of you!" he snapped so viciously Lottie could believe he really meant those words and he _had _tried to push her away just like he was pushing now.

"Well if you hate me then just leave me alone!" she shrieked, and with knuckles wrapped tight around the handle of her hairbrush, she let her temper snap and turned and hurled it across the room at him. It was a beautiful silver brush that had been passed down through her family, but by the time it reached him it was a silver-black spike of jagged metal and coke. It flew past his face so fast he had to dodge it, sinking deep into the wall.

On this occasion she was exactly as surprised as him that it had happened, and both stared at the mean throwing-knife that had almost shaved a corner out of his face. Carefully he raised a hand and touched his fingers to the edges, which were sharp enough to draw blood from even the lightest touch. Like they'd been burned as fine as a hair by Lottie's fury.

"That's more like it," he leered as he squeezed the drops from his fingers. "See what you could do if you had a little more hate in your heart?"

"Oh you are just _getting me there!" _she hollered. "That was one of my favourite brushes as well!" She stomped her foot and the floor gave way to a hairline crack. Pictures shook off the walls, which buckled and palpitated; like the first time he'd lost his temper with her, now she was the one with her finger on the pin. She could feel the surges of power that ripped objects from their home and flung them at him like hurricane winds.

"You want to fight – little girl?" he derided, and as the floor started to crumble and give way under their feet he began throwing things straight back at her. A crystal ornament that shot from her dresser towards his face then rebounded and smashed a five-inch dent in the wall.

"I'm not a little girl!" she screamed over the howl of a personal tornado. As the dressings tore from her bed and pillows whipped around the space and were torn open, filling the air with feathers, a deafening roar cut in over all.

"You know nothing!_" _There was a flash of darkness rather than light, then he dashed forwards and the game was over. His hands were around her neck and her feet weren't on the floor, because she was dangling from the wall like a wind-chime. He had her hoisted up on his long, iron hands.

"You have but a drop of my power," he growled, and Lottie wasn't choking, but she wasn't comfortable either. She couldn't even reach him over the length of his grip. "Play with me if you like," he suggested blackly, "but you're going to lose."

Then he let her fall and she crumpled to the floor with a wheeze all broken-accordion with the keys ripped out. She remembered who – and _what_ – she was dealing with, too late to take any of it back.

Before she could break and cry like the scared silly girl she was in front of him, he was gone.


	8. VIII

This ought to be the penultimate chapter of this little saga, (_if you don't include the clusterfuck of my feelings and projections about long distance relationship heartache that I consider a 'sequel' of sorts.) _Enjoy, and kind (or interesting) words make all the difference.

* * *

_Persephone_

_VIII_

* * *

Lottie was thinking about dying.

She'd promised herself that she wouldn't, that this was something she could and would survive because she wasn't going to let it beat her – but it wasn't quite like that. She wasn't thinking about something messy or tragic, but it had occurred to her after _he_ left her on the floor of a busted-up bedroom with tears in her eyes, that there was still one way out.

The white river wound through dark slate-like plains, countless human souls going through to somewhere else. She hoped most of them were going to be happy. It was reassuring to know there was somewhere to go in the end; with her life, her choices, she wondered where she would end up.

She hadn't bothered to clean up the room after he left, allowing it to remain rubble and debris as she scrubbed the sadness from her eyes. She coddled herself in a white dressing gown that smelled of home, wrapping it tight with a double-knot, thinking of the river that matched.

With bare feet she'd pushed open a scorched door and wandered into the corridor that served as the spine of this place. He was nowhere to be seen, which was fine. At this point she'd have been happy never to see him again.

She walked aimlessly for a while, alone in a strange world, until she came to the old archway that marked the passage into the plains of the river. It shone from afar, like white gold flowed through it. She felt the call; souls that recognised her as one of their own, who wanted her to join them.

It seemed like a long way to get to the banks, but further yet to find the end. She walked alongside the white waters until she reached the cliff, where spray poured into the void and a million hearts found resting places. It occurred to her that he might know she was here, if it was really his doing that sent each bolt of bright light to its hole.

She walked to the very edge and peered over, then scrunched up her knees and sat on the ledge. Hung her bare toes over the drop into infinity, alongside a channel of souls that passed her by like jealous fishes.

It was at this point that she found herself thinking about dying. Maybe not dying, but skipping ahead. Would it be so bad, she wondered, or would he send her soul somewhere awful out of spite?

He was a tangle of thorns that hurt her every time she tried to pry open a knot, and she was pricked and bleeding and not even scared any more, just exhausted. Fear had burned her out like acid. She tightened her fingers around the edge and looked over again, thoughts of flying.

"What are you doing?"

It was odd that she hadn't noticed his presence before he spoke. Perhaps because he wasn't hostile.

"Thinking," she answered uncooperatively.

"On what?" He didn't sound apologetic, but he wasn't angry either. But when Lottie thought about it, that just wasn't going to cut it. She'd portion up a slice of her mind for him, and if he didn't like it he could just push her over the edge and be done with it.

She put her hands to her sides and lifted herself, but from his perspective it must have looked like something else, because she couldn't move an inch further for being suddenly bound and parcelled.

As if he could stretch himself out in elastic or ribbons, his arms had found her even though he was stood up and she on the floor. Caught in a tide she flowed backwards and away from the cliff. Encircling her with endless lengths of arm, he gripped her hard to his front.

"Don't you dare." So close to him she could _feel_ as much as hear the timbre of his voice, the low raw tones that moved from chest to chest like cups pressed together.

"What did you think I was doing?" she queried. Looking down at herself, she thought it curious to see angular arms sheathed in black knotted so securely across her pure white gown. Like chess pieces playing a far more complicated game.

"What _were _you doing?" he responded, and for whatever reason he'd grabbed her like the last stick of candy in the store, he hadn't yet let go. Maybe he thought she'd jump if he did.

"I was just getting up," she remarked innocently. Slowly, like the danger was fading, he loosened off and she moved freely. "Why would you care?" she put to him, turning with a weighty swirl of her hem and facing the man-demon who was making her life the most confusing kind of trouble.

"You cannot end things so easily," he said with an authority she didn't think he had. Not if he was throwing himself half-way down the void to haul her back in one piece.

"I thought you hated me," she stated.

"I don't." It wasn't remorse, but it was something not too far off. "If I am responsible for your death." It began as a confession and then he stopped himself. A tongue that poured too quickly.

"What?" she demanded. "You'll get in trouble?" He clearly didn't want to say it, but that niggling feeling she'd had was right. He wasn't meant – perhaps even not allowed – to hurt her. So if he let her die then that was a much worse kettle of fish. He'd said some gatekeepers didn't last long, and perhaps not _all _of them just wore out.

"Are we really married?" she asked candidly, and he gave a pained sigh. Lottie was realising she might not have been the only one to make an ill-thought-out decision.

"Yes and no," he answered solemnly. "Enough to make things difficult, but not enough to..." there was a secret, right behind violet eyes. She wanted to know why he withheld these things from her.

"Why did you take me?" she persisted.

"I thought it would be interesting," he admitted, emphasis on the past.

"So," she declared, crossing her arms over herself and pulling up to her full height. "Whatare we going to do about it now?" He let out a laugh and leaned onto the cane that seemed to grow out of one hand.

"That _is_ a good question," he remarked with a sultry but subtly miserable tone.

"I have an idea," she began brightly, and for once he had the time of day. "You can apologise for earlier." He scoffed and span his cane.

"Big dreams," he jested. "Why should I?"

"Because you're not meant to throw people up against walls and shout at them," she declared.

"You threw a knife at me," he pointed out.

"It was a hairbrush."

"_Was _it now?" he queried, and the area was admittedly grey. "Give me one good reason."

"It's the right thing to do," she tried, and he gave a chuckle.

"Nice try, kiddo," he derided. She didn't really like his terminology; she was called childish by enough people on the other side.

"The spirits would like it," she attempted anew, and his laughter was both richer and more sinister that time.

"You're an expert on their ways now?" he mocked. Lottie thought to teach him a lesson.

"Well... maybe I'm just a silly little girl from New Orleans, but I do know a thing or two," she remarked so coolly she had ice on top of her words. Then she did something mad. She paced backwards until she hit the edge of the cliff, then spread her arms out and _fell_.

Before she could even take hold of the fear, he was elastic and desperate and reeling her back in like a fish on a hook with strong flexible arms and a force that pulled her like a magnet.

"Don't _do _that!" he snapped, yanking her like a stubborn trout and dragging her heels along the rock as he pulled her away.

"See?" she baited, and could tell he was furious – that she could prove he did care. That he was obliged to save her sorry life for some reason.

"I could've let you go," he glowered, and she didn't believe him half as much as he wanted her to.

"Coulda shoulda woulda," she taunted, more comfortable in his grip than she meant to be. It came with a feeling of security rather not imprisonment. "You oughta apologise to me because that's what a good husband would do," she added boldly, but he only rolled his eyes.

"That line's going to lose its freshness soon," he forewarned, letting her go and taking a confident step backward – as confident as a retreat could look. "We might be bound in name, but no more."

"What?" she queried. "But they said-"

"Think of the ritual as ceremony," he explained bluntly. "Even marriages in _your_ world require more than that to be considered valid."

"Uh... do you mean?" She found she couldn't quite put it into words with the confidence she imagined.

"Consummation," he answered succinctly. "In body." With the looks he was giving her, like a cat eyeing a piece of fish, Lottie thought she ought to feel intimidated, but it was curiously absent. She'd stopped being frightened of him in the same way. Maybe he'd scared it all out of her.

"Oh," she declared nonchalantly. "Okay." She popped her hands on her hips and swung from one side to the other, challenging him to make something of it.

"Most girls of your background would be afeared of suggestions like that," he pointed out, trying to be scary – she could identify it now. He stretched out his profile like he was a cat puffing up his fur, but it was just a trick of the light. "So why aren't you?"

"Maybe because I know you won't hurt me," she said calmly. Even when they'd had a bust-up and he threw her up against a wall by the throat, it hadn't actually hurt; all fireworks and no fire.

"Not unless you ask me to," he retorted slyly.

"What?" she puzzled. "Why would I askyou to?"

He narrowed his eyes and flew her a countenance that was so undeniably mischievous it sent spiders running down her dress. It was the texture of a tongue up a neck and he'd said girls like her should be scared of men like him, and she was sure he didn't mean because he was lord of the underworld.

However, she stood her ground because it was all she could do, and she had half a mind that was sure every lewd threat he made put him further and further from actually doing anything.

"Are you _waiting _for something?" he commented wryly, noticing her lack of a retreat.

"You," she retorted. "You're the one that runs," she added. "Go on, scurry off. That's all you do."

"What?" he sounded indignant, like he couldn't really see it.

"You start a fight, make a threat, and then you run," she declared. "Kidnap a girl from the real world and if she dares give you anything but tears and fright, you're the one that runs. All you've done is run and run from responsibility – which from what I hear is the reason you ended up down here in the _first _place, so heck you shoulda learned by now." He looked like she gone and whacked him around the face with her purse.

"I didn't ask for your two cents on my life," he hissed like a caged cat.

"So run again," she goaded. "Where do you even go?!"

"It doesn't matter to you," he snarled, and she could sense the air igniting again.

"It does because I might only _get _one husband in my life!" she burst. "To hell if I picked right but I _did _pick and I'm not gonna stay an old maid forever because _someone _is yellower than a cornfield!"

"Do you really want to be kissed that much?" he spat like the words were broken glass in his mouth, and she felt caught out – _was _that what she was getting at? Now he'd said it, it did sound awful suspicious. She'd dug her grave, of course, and was going to pull back the silly overstep when he gave a growl like a savage and stepped at her like she were the ladder to a gallows. "Get over here, then."

Her eyes could've grown big enough to fit on the hood of a car and take out for a night drive, and she would've been the rabbit caught in the way as well. Words she might have used were 'what?' and 'are you crazy?' Instead she went right ahead and took a step towards him. She realised it was a test when he grinned, smile was so sharp it could've been sliced open with a razor.

"Well well," he slurred, reading her movement as the confirmation. It wasn't a question, but an insult. "Figures." It'd been a test, Lottie realised. He said it to see if she'd react, and she'd swum right into his mouth. If faces could melt, hers would've pinked into nothing by now.

"I'm not-" she began defiantly, and then his thumb and forefinger were firm around her jaw, holding her chin and silencing her.

Lottie barely knew what she was doing any more, except for once he wasn't running away, and hell if she was going to be here for three months straight without the question of their supposed-marriage coming up. She forgot to breathe somewhere in-between taking that step in her silly wedding-dress white bedclothes and him reaching up with hands like bats and taking her face in his fingers.

There was trapped energy inside him, like he wanted to run but someone had nailed his feet down, and for the second she dared look him in the eyes. There were so many things she imagined in there not one seemed right. He was whatever enigma he was; who had her jaw like a piece of porcelain, which he tipped upward and stooped to touch his mouth to hers.

This time there was no blood or ceremony or magic to interrupt, just Lottie trying to get a handle on what was happening like a live shrimp. She didn't know if she'd asked for this or provoked it but it was _happening _and she was ten shades of sick for a whole bunch of different reasons. She shut her eyes tight and felt the hum that came off him like a hot tank of water, butterfly-light touches of his fingers against her cheek, and just when she remembered to breathe again the feeling disappeared like it was the memory of a dream.

She fluttered eyelids open again and saw nothing. He was gone. Vanished.

"Oh you cannot be serious!"she pelted so loud her voice must have bounced off the ceiling and all the way out to the other world.

Charlotte La Bouff was getting fed up.

It wasn't that she wantedthe Shadow Man to do or not do the thing they were playing hopscotch around, she was just awful sick of it being somewhere in the middle just about _all _the time. So when she stormed through reams of corridors and doors in the underworld, she had half a mind to chew him out like day-old gum, and half a mind to just do something and then sit on him so he couldn't run away. Heck, he probably could, but at least she'd be trying something new.

It was when she started throwing open doors and strange drifting shapes, flamboyant eyed masks and little dolls carrying extremely large needles poured out that she finally got his attention. He swept into the area like a wind and threw all the spirits she was letting out back into their caves, slamming the doors shut on top, finishing with his back to one and a whole lot of irritation in his eyes.

"If you'd refrain from bringing about chaos in my world," he said dryly, but before he was done Lottie charged up to him and whacked her fists against the lapels of his jacket.

"Will you _stop _being so confusing!" she hollered as she pounded her hands against him, and it wasn't doing a darn thing but it was better than nothing.

"Confusing?" he echoed. "Same to yourself," he turned around, and Lottie didn't see how that could make a lick of sense.

"I'm not the one playing disappear any time we- well I'm not the one running away!" she amended.

"I'm not runnin-"

"Of course you are!" she interjected. "Is it a game to you?! Or are you just _scared _of all five foot two of me?"

"Of _you_?" he scathed. "Try again."

"Oh yeah?!" she burst, and then from beating she turned to grip and took fistfuls of his jacket and hauled herself up, maybe even off the ground, to put her lips on his and hold it there until he started to writhe. "Go and disappear," she challenged as she tore back like ripping off sticking plaster. "Prove me right." For once he stayed put, pressed up against the wall like an alleycat facing down a pack of dogs, shoulders spread out and his hands flat to the wall like he'd pass through it if his pride wasn't holding him in place. "Just what is it you're scared of?" she asked in exasperation.

"You don't know what there is to fear," he said with tentative confession. "It isn't you."

"Then why're you acting like I'm the monster?" she put out, not releasing him for fear he might slip through her fingers.

"I don't have to answer to you," he said sourly.

"You don't, but ifyou refuse I swear I'm gonna chase you all the way to hell and back!" she preached, lit with the fire of her own impatience. "Do you think I'm stupid or something?"

"No," he berated with a roll of the eyes.

"Then what is it?" she shot, but he had hands on her arms and was pushing her away like a porch door.

"We can't be like this," he said coldly. _We_ seemed oddly fitting in either of their mouths.

"Why not?" she demanded, and then realised it sounded like she was the number one fan of the idea; it wasn't that, she just wasn't very good at being told she couldn't have something.

"You can't _tempt_ me!" he snapped not as a declaration but a request, then in a heartbeat tried to snatch the words and stuff them back in. Don't tempt_, _like a sinner with an apple. Lottie didn't feel like forbidden fruit, but there was a look behind violet eyes that suggested maybe she just couldn't see it.

"Oh," she murmured, letting herself be distanced. "Is that really-" she never finished the sentence because he wasn't there to finish hearing it. He vaporised like a cloud of smoke and Lottie was left with a wall, bracing her hands to the stonework and leaning against it like she might not be able to stand up on her own.


	9. IX

_I decided to turn one absurdly big chapter into two smaller ones, and 10 is a great number._

_I hope people weren't expecting content that is not what this is about. No no no._

_Also this is basically entirely so Tackles will draw me more obscene and wonderful art mwuhaha._

* * *

_Persephone_

_IX_

* * *

Left alone with too many thoughts and too much time to think about them in, Lottie found herself wandering – alone – like she had become one of the ghosts who'd haunted her. In turns she returned to 'her' room again, an empty shell of rubble, but that was only superficial. In a turn it was tidied back to a bedroom, adorned with a large four-poster and silly cute things that reminded her of home without being an exact replica. A large window let in false light until she drew the curtains across it, dimming the place under an artifice of evening.

By lamplight she brushed her hair and took off her makeup, tired in mind if not in body. Perhaps she could sleep it all away, she thought to herself as she slipped into silk pyjamas and cocooned herself in the covers, at rest for a moment. Three months slumber, like a bear.

She'd been there long enough to start drifting, if not in to actual sleep then into some dreamlike state. Then the door let out a squeak – one she'd put there, programmed into its hinges to know if someone came for her. A second's silence seemed more oppressive when it was shared, and she didn't bring her head up out of the feather-hole to see who it was.

"Charlotte?" a name used sparingly, now sympathetically. Why had he come back for her? "Are you _really_ asleep?" he added sharp with sarcasm. That was more like him, bitter like coffee without sugar. She was sweet enough for two.

She said nothing but marked his movements, footsteps laid like paving stones over to her bed, hidden in the absence of light. With coasting turns he settled on the end of her bed, back to her, elbows pressed to knees. She didn't look to see this with her eyes, but felt as if it must be true.

"This is bigger than you and I alone," he spoke out of nowhere, a dialogue that had no partner. "You don't know much... I haven't said anything."

_Exactly_, she felt like saying, but also suspected that to respond would be to break the glass.

"If I were to tell you what's at the end of the strings, you'd be scared too," he continued, and she read the hidden confession. "It's true, I am..." rusty words from him, hard to pry past stubborn lips, "afraid." She felt him go down a size with a single breath, deflating like a hot air balloon, shrinking back down to his real shape, rather than a puffed up image.

"The spirits who dragged me down here have more plans for you than I realised," he began, then couldn't find his words. "I underestimated." That much was right, she thought to herself, slowly pushing upright against her mattress and bundling covers around her like layers of snow.

"They _want_ us to," he continued with an unspoken suggestion, "and I don't know why. It isn't their game to do something for nothing." She wasn't sure if he was talking to her or himself most sincerely. Maybe he had to use her as a prop to purge the truth from his blood. "Your pretty head comes with a price tag." For the first time she could catch some concerns of his in an ear, finding out just how hollow all his omniscience and shows of force were.

"Like what?" she inquired, and he only shook his head.

"They give only to take away," he mumbled.

"Isn't it better to have something once rather than never at all?" she found herself saying, watching his outline, darker than all the other black.

"To you, maybe," he commented. He did hear her, then.

That attitude was her all over anyway; take it now and taste it and cry when it was gone, but at least you had it for a moment. Princess for a night. He slumped forward with face covered by his hands, fingertips becoming lost in the weaves of his hair.

"I don't place bets unless I'm the one rigging the game," he sighed, then changed tack as if a yacht in stormy winds. "I know I haven't levelled with you, about anything."

_I know, _she might have said, but didn't.

"Until now," she offered instead, and his response was muffled by the intervention of his hands. "So why now?" she pressed. It had to be asked. She understood that this too could be a trick, though she didn't believe it in her heart. He was too proud to play broken for the sake of a fool.

"If you understood, I thought you might stop..." he answered, and she moved on her knees a little closer.

"Stop what?" she dared to say, even though she'd half a mind that already knew.

"Making it hard," he ground, and she shuffled ever-closer. Almost enough to touch now.

"Maybe if you stopped being stubborn," she replied, and it was easier to act under cover of darkness. To not have to see her hand reaching out for his shoulder made it easy, settling first on padding then followed by another; two arms possessed of their own will. They curled around his shoulders and crossed over breastbone. She did want him to feel something – comforted, perhaps. If that was something she could grant. "You're torturing yourself so they don't have to," she pointed out. It wasn't hard to see, even for her. "What's wrong with trying to enjoy?" she whispered too close to a stretch of neck and fan of ear.

His fingertips wrapped like vines around her wrist, holding her back and in place at the same time. Like he couldn't bear to let her get closer, but still feared her pulling away. In a broken second his grip turned stronger and he was swiveling piece-by-piece up his spine, turning like an adder until Lottie was falling down onto her back with covers bunched around her, closing in all sides that weren't his face and arms and shoulders.

"Don't you dare ask that," he murmured, her knees bunched under one of his arms like he could just pick her up and put her in a pocket.

"I'm not going anywhere," she said even though it seemed obvious, and his laugh was nothing more than breaths dancing down her cheek.

"You can't know that," he replied. "What if you're another thing to torment me?" Lottie didn't need to be big and grown up and married to know what he meant. Let him want her and have something just to rip it away for the sake of his misery. But she didn't feel like something to be evaporated in a puff of smoke. Just where would they even send her, she wondered blindly as his fingers curled and the back of his knuckles traced along the underside of her knee.

"Have a little faith," she said brightly. He started to laugh, but never finished. Charlotte La Bouff never was good at waiting for something close enough to snatch.

She stopped him with a kiss that couldn't and shouldn't have existed but here it was and she didn't give a damn any more. What _if _she only got one husband in her life, she wondered; what if she got another but it was just a Douglas, a bland and boring country boy with all his manners and life set out in shades of obligation without a hint of fairytale or destiny. What if it didn't feel like swallowing too much hot tea at once, heat spreading through her chest as she kissed him and he kissed her _back_ like a kettle spitting steam, screaming because it'd been left on the heat far too long.

Lottie didn't know much about love, but she did know about wanting things.

She also had an idea that anyone who touched her like this didn't have so much investment in hurting her. Not someone who kissed her neck and drew his hand across her stomach like a canvas and who didn't say a word like something had gone into his mouth and pulled the smart answers out of it.

"See? I'm still here," she panted like the proof, feeling a twist in her spine and squirming under his careful weight. He answered without words, only moving to allow her to slip a leg onto the other side of him, then grazing his mouth up her throat, the gentlest scratch of whiskers on her skin. He knew she was here still, but lest he speak and ruin the spell. A nightmare he might wake up from.

Lottie from New Orleans, the princess of Mardi Gras and little else, might have out-and-out fainted if she saw what was going on through old eyes. Legs hooked around not just any man, not just someone older, from outside her class and race – a condemned soul chained to the underworld for eternity, the link between one life and the after-life. Who had snatched her like a greedy child but had been scared to claim what he stole.

In fact, Lottie reflected, just about everyone in the entire city of New Orleans would be in fits over what she was allowing, encouraging, even. However, she wasn't Lottie of Lousiana only and nowhere else. That had all changed; if she _was _– and she was beginning to feel like it – his wife, this was her place to be, her right.

Frankly, it was about _time _something like this happened. The fairytales hadn't been quite exact, but Lottie didn't see something like this coming along again. You couldn't ignore it if fate rang. The tales hadn't been quite so explicit, either, but heck if the princes and princesses didn't get to down to it sooner or later. Tiana wasn't having a baby because she danced the Charleston with Naveen.

"Are you sure about this?" his voice rose like bubbles out of a swamp, surfacing from far down where light couldn't shine. "There's no going back."

"You're my husband, aren't you?" she answered. A low noise that could've been a growl, trapped somewhere in his chest before it escape, pressed against her though a poor barrier of silk, and soon his hands were making space between her skin and bedclothes. He plied the top over her head and she dipped back into the inkwell of his mouth, electrified by the sense of her skin bare against another's.

He didn't seem to wear clothes – not in the conventional sense, because each disappeared as they became obsolete, leaving only taut muscles stretched over a frame slightly too big for them. His hands had made incursions beneath her clothes before they were shed, but it still felt like a milestone to be naked like a bride. Her vulnerability was supplanted by his presence back between her legs before she had time to think rationally about anything, and his forehead pressed to hers, like they held a penny between them. Mouths broke apart as she took breaths she'd been forgetting to have at sensible times.

Lottie remembered the time she'd pulled Tiana away from anyone else and sat her down and asked her with all and total seriousness just _what _it was like being married in the biblical sense. She'd heard this and that and the other, but if she was going to trust anyone's story it would be Tiana, and she and Naveen seemed pretty happy like _all _of the time.

With a little bit of fussing, Tiana had provided explanations and a few awkward hand gestures. Apparently when Lottie realised what she meant she pulled a face like a cat with a bowl of sour milk and Tiana laughed all afternoon. At the time it had seemed all rather unusual, and even when she washed and looked down at her naked body she thought that it couldn't possibly make sense, but then again, she hadn't been very enlightened.

Not that she was much more enlightened now, but she had a more realistic sense because it was hard not to get it with a man between your legs and something hard that she'd heard all sorts of tall and big tales about.

"Are you ready?" he said with teeth to her neck. "There's still time."

"Do you _want _me to change my mind?" she remarked voraciously, which had him laughing all the way through her chest until it echoed her heartbeat.

"No," he admitted with hoarseness, like his vocal chords were getting a rust on.

"Then don't ask again," she declared, and like she'd asked for it he tightened a hand around her arm and pressed his weight over her.

"It might hurt," he warned, and the _might_ sounded like a highly optimistic bet. She'd heard that from Tia as well, though she'd insisted that Naveen was very gentle when Lottie had been shocked by the notion.

"Okay," she accepted, dispensing consent as a happy afterthought once the horse was already bolted. She wondered how rigid the rules were about having to _let_ him hurt her, because when he grinned and bit a mouthful of her neck the pain was unfamiliar and immediate. He hadn't done it before, but she only snatched a breath and secured grip in his hair.

"Worse than that," he seemed to tease, and Lottie twisted her hand a bit.

"I'm not a little girl," she reprimanded. Nor made of glass.

"Evidently not," he purred, hand between her legs.

Lottie had a notion that it was easier to feel these things out than it would've been to look, and was thankful of the blinding darkness that she'd cast on the room, like a spell to summon him to her. Nothing felt so strange or unnatural as she'd imagined, although it _did _hurt.

It didn't feel like becoming one flesh, uniting in perfect harmony or anything as magical as sweet imaginations to make excited girls feel better about their wedding nights – it felt like being possessed, invaded and owned. But when he stopped, and held her, kissed her; tongue seeking out hers which felt obliged to respond – it was still good.

"Now you aremine," he sealed on damp lips. She believed it. Lottie reminded herself this had been her big idea, and wondered what seven hells of madness she'd drawn it out of.

It didn't cease to hurt, but what pain there was started to drown with time and repetition. No one had dared or been able to describe to her how or why it felt good to be taken this way, but it _was_ and she had gasps and licentious noises on her tongue that she found herself trying to bury in his mouth or shoulder more often than not.

When time was an hourglass of imprecise size, it was hard to tell how long anything went on for here, but it seemed both an age and a flash that they remained in the dark tangled as only lovers did. An age for how much happened and changed, but for all that it seemed to be over very suddenly. With a hiss and her nails digging for gold under a shoulderblade, too much happening at once, it was finished and he'd given himself to her.

With the dizziness for a moment she feared she _might _disappear, like it was the cunning plan of the fates all along. But yet she remained, bloodied and broken with her heart beating hard in her chest and stinging between her legs. She imagined being cold as his skin left hers.

"Warm water," he spoke out of hallowed silence with no respect for what she'd given to him. She was shocked at first to hear him like he was real and rational once more. "It'll help." She heard a soft snap of his fingers and then there was a dim light emanating from her bedside – nothing too harsh and assaulting as daylight.

She got up, feeling awkward and sticky, and grasped for a wet rag from the air by her right hand, a bowl sitting just below like wires hung it from the roof. Washing up, she saw the red of blood and must have let slip a noise.

"It's normal," he answered soothingly, still reclined on the bed with a calmed countenance.

"For you, or-" she began hesitantly.

"For everyone," he assured. "Don't worry about it."

"Oh." She didn't like to sound so helpless or contemplative, but with a haze of unreality swaddling her head, she didn't really know what to do with herself, finding her fingers pressed to her lips as she looked blankly at the heavy curtains covering an un-window.

She heard him move, then with reassuring warmth, like mid-morning sun at just the right time of year, his hand alighted on her shoulder. He felt very tall behind her, but still close as his face rested alongside the back of her head, sharing secrets to her ruffled hair.

"To bed," he murmured, fingers shadowing the turns of her body without pushing. "It is done already."

Feeling very naked, Lottie allowed herself be shepherded back to the bed she made, and lay down to sleep in it.

* * *

_Once there was a time where I shied away from the less glamorous aspects of virginity-fics. NOT ANYMORE._


	10. X

The final chapter of this story, I hope it was enjoyable, if a little unusual.

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_Persephone_

_X_

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It seemed very poetic and yet not quite accurate to say that Charlotte had gone to bed a girl and woken up a woman, although it sure would've been a nice comforting thing to hold onto. Mostly she woke up sore and alarmed, wondering what kind of spectres had jumped into her skin last night and gone deciding crazy things would be a good idea.

She would've known without looking, but she just had to check that _he_ was still there on the other side of her bed like it was _their _bed and no one else's. He seemed to be sleeping, or at some stage of rest in which he wasn't easily disturbed. She couldn't quite put the picture of him at peace, eyes closed, together with the memories and experiences of the night – or whatever it was – before. With an arm draped loosely over his body, he appeared as naked as, well, _she _was, not that she was going peeking under sheets to find out.

If she had been out of her depth when she arrived in this world, now she'd no hope of seeing the surface again. She'd completed the unholy, scared ritual. She'd given her virginity away to this man-demon-immortal who slept lazily on like it'd meant nothing. She was going to have to go home and live this life, strange and foreign as it seemed.

She was ready to move away, to roll out of the bed and go as far away as she could and sit in a corner for some days or weeks until she stopped feeling like this – or got used to it – when he drew a hand as if on string and trailed it along her leg.

"Wife," he pronounced with a low purr, eyes still closed like he was still asleep. Lottie didn't know what to do, held under his palm and summoned by title.

"...Yes?" she queried, and with deft grip he curled a hand around her hip and scooped her up like a pancake, pulling her to him until she was flat on his chest with one sturdy arm worn around her waist like a belt.

"I wondered if you would answer," he declared with sleepy confidence, bare slits of his eyes appearing under heavy lids.

"I guess so," she said timidly, and with a smirk that had simmered like embers all night, he put his mouth to her throat and she felt his tongue and she forgot all about running away and made an elongated vowel and let him hold her.

She looked down at her body on top of his, the contrast of their complexion and how little and short she seemed against his miles of legs. Pushing herself up on her forearms she looked over him, eye to eye. He couldn't lie to her any more.

"We're really married now, aren't we?" It seemed obvious but she had to hear it.

"Yes," he rumbled, hands mapping the cartography of her body inch by inch. "The union is complete." She imagined that she could feel it; a greater connection. As if she could reach into his skin and feel him for brief moments, only to be shut back out by a barrier that she knew held off some unimaginable pain and horror.

"So... I'm yours?" she phrased tritely, but his chuckle was not of irritation.

"And I yours," he responded, and she quirked her head to one side and took him in. A man, lord, prince of this-and-that of the underworld – now hers.

"So I can do this?" she baited, and then with childish impulse ducked forward and kissed him on the mouth, unprepared for the token. He wore a grin as he rolled, turning side-over-side until she was underneath him and he the sky over her, a scent like incense and something human and lost.

"And much more," he slurred, dipping his mouth to meet hers with total security. She accepted it as though it were hers – well, it _was _hers. She'd have to get used to it. "I knew it," he panted upon breaking apart, bristling like a porcupine and moving out from over her. It seemed more conspicuous _not _to be touched somehow.

"What?" Lottie forwarded, edging closer. "Was it something I did?" She was still new to all this bridal stuff, although she didn't know how much of what she'd learned in etiquette class was going to apply in here. Certainly not cooking and cleaning or the running of a household – though to be fair she'd no love lost over that.

"No," he secured, turning to one side and propping his head on his hand. "I know what their game is now."

"Who?"

"The spirits," he answered dryly. "I was sure they had some design in giving you to me."

"Oh no," she mumbled, thinking of his fear and terrible things.

"I see it now," he remarked. "Horribly simple, really. Being with someone – with _you_," he specified even though it didn't need to be done and Lottie liked that for some reason. "It feels the most... it's still the same. The _only_ thing that feels the same."

"Is that important?" she queried.

"Oh yes," he purred. "It's a bribe."

"A bribe?" she chirped. The word was oddly shaped in her mouth. "Why would they be paying you off?"

"To serve," he murmured. "Lock a dog in a cage with a bitch and he'll stop scratching at the door."

"Hey!" she chided.

"I'm just explaining," he remarked, and there was curtness back in his voice again. The real him was back, no longer a spellbound lover with sleep in his eyes.

"Well you coulda picked prettier words," she berated, sitting up with the covers bunched about her chest.

"Poor girl," he chuckled, and it was like he branded her with every syllable, pressed them red-hot into her skin with the word – _mine. _"There's good news, though," he picked up, and Lottie fastened her babydoll eyes on him like a pair of earrings. "They expected me to fool you into eating."

"You tried," she pointed out, only to receive a careless shrug in return.

"To eat binds you to this world for good," he reiterated, and boy didn't she know it. "The consolation prize of Atlas's hardships. You're not _meant _to leave, yet you are able – with my help."

"So what?" she puzzled, not knowing why it made any kind of sense and smelling scheming like milk on the turn.

"_So_, I can have you but still look for my way out," he lauded. "When you go back it'll be even easier to- hey." His device abruptly ended at the moment Lottie ran out of the bed with covers trailing behind her like a bridal train, tears ready to turn to steam on her cheeks.

"Well isn't that all just swell!" she burst, crossing the room and grabbing awkwardly for her dressing gown where it'd been too carelessly dropped. "I'm glad everything's working out so great for you. Not like I-" she stopped her mouth with a plug before she could say too much and shifted the gown tighter around her.

She'd been kind and foolish and the worst kind of rube. For a moment he'd seemed human, full of blood and not black magic, and she'd fallen for it, gave her whole self to him like a sympathetic idiot.

"Wait, wait a sec-" he fussed, chasing her out of the bed with loose pants sweeping around his ankles – she was glad he had something on, at least. The material was dark and fine, as if it could've been spun out of midnight, and fell fluidly from a poker-straight waist like it might have been a skirt. Were Lottie in any other temperament she'd have found it amusing.

"What's all this about?" he cooed like he could or would care a fig about her, but she shook his hands off her back like an ugly scarf when they came to rest there, turning an icicle of a shoulder in his face.

"Did you mean any of it it?" she hissed, crossing her arms like they could padlock her heart shut.

"Yes?" he sounded surprised. "_Yes_," he soothed as the words sunk in, reaching for her again with the cunning crows he had tamed for hands. "Why this trouble?" he probed, daring to ask like it might not be obvious or worthwhile.

"I'm not just a thing you _have_," she ground out. "Some bit of... I don't even know, that you snatched and seduced and now you think you can just, just-" she was getting hysterical, and in other worlds with other company she might have been told to calm down. He did shush her, but it was a soothing hiss that came with a petting hand on her arm, not a command for silence.

"No," he said quietly. "It isn't like that."

"Well you said I was your... you know," she spited. "That you could _have _me, like it's just... like it's all I am-"

"No," he insisted, wincing like he was hurt. "Charlotte," he murmured, weaving through her eyeline like a bird, trying to catch her gaze as if it were an insect. "You're..." he trailed off, words faltering. He moved like he might kiss her, but she wasn't having that.

"What?" she demanded. Turned her mouth away from him like a denied bowl for soup. "What am I?" He didn't take to her rejection and darted quick hands to hold her by the face, turning her back to him like positioning a parasol.

"My bride," he said with a flash of that intimacy again. More gently, he tipped her face upwards, not forcing any more. "You mean more."

"Than what?" she spat. "Prove it." He gave a sly smile.

"I would, but aren't you still sore?" he commented, and the laughter in his voice skipped down her back like a stone skimming on water.

"I didn't mean _that_," she deferred. Not to mention it would only prove her fears, that he _was _just after the one thing they said men like him were after. "Something sincere."

"Are you asking me for a symbol of my affection?" he posed with just a slight of sarcasm under the velvet of his tone, words chosen as carefully as bullets. She supposed she was.

"Exactly." She propped her hands on her hips and stared him out and _wouldn't _be intimidated or shamed, because if she was wrong she was so very wrong, and she couldn't look that kind of failure in the eye.

For a moment he was still as undisturbed water, a resting pool of thought, until a thread pulled up one end of his mouth. He raised both his hands to her and spread spidery fingers wide, closed and open again, then crossed and made to pull something from the air, tucked up in his palm.

"What have you got?" she cheeped, but he kept his fingers viced shut and shook his head when she moved to unfold them. He nodded to her left hand, which she held up and watched, the same as it'd ever been.

Things made more sense when he took it inside his own, a pearl sitting inside a shell. He bowed low, almost at right angles as he pecked like a bird and pressed his mouth to her knuckles, warm and slightly abrasive and full of sinister energy.

At first she thought he was only putting on theatrics, that it was a game to distract and entertain her. Then she looked at her hand and saw the ring. Without feeling anything, through pure power of his magic, he had wrapped her ring finger in a band of shimmering black metal. He had planted it with a kiss and there it grew, a part of her as much as her skin or hair or heart.

"Oh," she said in soft blurred breaths. "Well, I..."

"Is that good enough?" he asked smugly. He could read her and knew exactly how she felt. Biting her lip, she bobbed her head in affirmation. Her hand felt heavy as he chuckled and pulled her to his chest, but she let him because she had neither the heart nor will not to. Wearing the weight of a world on one of her skinny pink fingers, she shut her eyes and breathed him, let the rains come as she turned her face to the sky and accepted lips on hers, a mouth that would match and mimic her own.

She was bound in metal and blood, for better or worse.

_End of Act 1 : Persephone_


End file.
